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Research Spotlight: Shaunté Duggins

Q & A with Shaunté Duggins, Ph. D., Director of State Initiatives for the UF Lastinger Center for Learning

What research are you currently working on?

I am currently working on measuring the impact of the New Worlds Reading Initiative on children and their caregivers. In particular, I am seeking to understand the impact of the patented Kibeam Wand™, a proprietary, cutting-edge product designed to support children’s book reading using screen-less technology.

What is the broader impact of your research?

Overall, exploring the impact and experiences of children and families enrolled in the New Worlds Reading Initiative will provide insights into how the program can be enhanced to support literacy learning. Additionally, data collected from the experiences and engagement of families with a Kibeam Wand will help us better understand the potential benefits of leveraging screen-less technology to scaffold striving readers’ engagement and interactions with text.

What other research topics are you interested in?

The goal of the New Worlds Reading Initiative is to foster ongoing, positive connections among families, schools, and communities around a shared mission: ensuring that all children learn to read and are supported in developing a lifelong love of reading. New Worlds Reading partners with the community, educators, and caregivers to strengthen children’s language interactions and bolster literacy skills. As this program develops, additional research activities will be explored to understand the efficacy.

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Research Spotlight: Elyssa Geer

Q & A with Elyssa Geer, Ph. D., Assistant Professor in the School of Special Education School Psychology & Early Childhood Studies

What research are you currently working on?

I am currently working on understanding the interplay between spatial skills, executive function, and mathematical skills in preschoolers. Spatial skills are a diverse set of skills that allow us to successfully navigate our day-to-day lives. These skills can be as large-scale as our ability to navigate to and from work, or more small-scale like the ability to complete a jigsaw puzzle. My work, in conjunction with a plethora of existing research, has demonstrated a consistent connection between spatial and mathematical skills, though less is known about potential mechanisms that may explain how and why these skills are connected. Executive function may be one such mechanism.

Executive function is comprised of various cognitive skills such as working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, behavioral self-regulation, and planning. Working memory is the ability to encode information, carry it in the mind, and utilize it in the successful completion of a goal (e.g., the ability for a child to listen to a word problem, hold key information in their mind, and later use that information to solve the problem). Inhibitory control is the ability to suppress an unwanted behavior in order to engage in a more adaptive one (e.g., the ability for a child to refrain from employing incorrect strategies in order to solve a math problem, suppressing a simpler strategy, for example, in lieu of a more effective one). Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to shift one’s focus across changing subjects and goals (e.g., the ability to adapt quickly to different representations of quantity such as shifting from using dots to numerals). Behavioral self-regulation is a more complex, multi-faceted executive function skill that involves the integration of working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility in observable behaviors. An example of behavioral self-regulation is the ability to participate in a game of “Simon Says” in which you have to learn and remember the cardinal rule of only doing what “Simon Says,” while controlling any undesired behaviors and flexibly shifting between new tasks that you must do because “Simon Says.” Planning is another more complex executive function skill and refers to the ability to achieve a goal through a series of steps that involve organizing thoughts and behaviors to achieve said goal. For example, a child engages their planning skills when they plan out a structure they want to build using blocks in their classroom (e.g., a castle) and taking the necessary steps to build such a structure (e.g., using bigger blocks at the base to make a foundation, then progressively smaller blocks to make the castle walls and towers).

My recent work has demonstrated that cognitive flexibility, behavioral self-regulation, and planning significantly mediate the spatial-mathematical link over time. That is to say that the connection between spatial and mathematical skills is explained, in part or in whole, by preschoolers’ executive function skills.

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Research Spotlight: Avery Closser

Q & A with Avery Closser, Ph. D., Assistant Professor in the School Teaching and Learning

What research are you currently working on?

 

I am currently leading an IES-funded project to examine whether and how subtle aesthetic changes to math problems (e.g., font colors, symbol spacing, symbol arrangement) can scaffold learning for elementary students in online activities. Our project team is designing two online experiments in an online tutoring system to examine the effects of perceptual scaffolding—subtle aesthetic features that highlight key information in math problems—on students’ performance and learning in online activities.

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Research Spotlight: Daryn Dever

Q & A with Daryn Dever, Ph. D., Assistant Professor in the School Teaching and Learning

What research are you currently working on?

I am currently focused on the enhancement of K-16 STEM education using game-based learning environments. Most recently, I have examined how a computer-based game has enhanced high-school and undergraduate students’ knowledge about infectious diseases and how they spread. My work looks at how students’ use of self-regulated learning strategies and processes changes over time captured via multimodal methodologies, such as eye-tracking, physiological responses, facial expressions of emotions, and log files. Through this, I can identify the behavioral and cognitive patterns indicative of optimal learning with game-based learning environments.

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Research Spotlight: Brady Nash

Q & A with Brady Nash, Ph. D., Assistant Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning

What research are you currently working on?

My research focuses on the incorporation of digital literacies into K-12 English language arts classrooms and within teacher education settings. I’m currently working on a qualitative study examining the incorporation of a new critical media literacy curriculum into high school English classrooms, a study exploring preservice teachers’ views of AI in K-12 schooling, and pedagogical materials that support teachers incorporating commercial video games into K-12 humanities classrooms.

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Research Spotlight: Melissa Mariani

Q & A with Melissa Mariani, Ph. D., Associate Professor in the School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education

What research are you currently working on?

I recently completed an American School Counselor Association (ASCA) Research grant that examined the impact of improving counselor-to-student ratios in high-need, Title I schools. This study, conducted through a partnership between at my prior university and a large, neighboring school district, analyzed de-identified, retrospective student data in schools where bilingual/bicultural (ESOL/ELL) counselors who completed school counseling degrees between 2001 to 2019 were placed. The findings revealed that lower counselor-to-student ratios were associated with significant improvements in student attendance, behavior, and academic achievement. The results will be published in an ASCA Research Report by the end of the year, and further analysis is planned for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

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Research Spotlight: Christopher Engledowl

What research are you currently working on? Currently, in my role as a Research Scientist in the Lastinger Center for Learning, I am engaged in 4 major areas of research. Drawing on my background in mathematics education research, in a collaborative role with the mathematics education team, I am leading a study of the impact […]

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Research Spotlight: Elyse Hambacher

Q & A with Elyse Hambacher, Ph. D., Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Teaching & Learning

What research are you currently working on?

My current research focuses on the development of educators’ critical social justice literacy and how teaching for social justice is operationalized in education settings. I am the Principal Investigator of a Spencer Foundation grant that examines how justice-oriented White teachers and administrators in one predominantly White school district engage with concepts of race, anti-racism, and whiteness. Our research team is working on several manuscripts related to this project.

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Research Spotlight: Christopher Anthony

Q & A with Christopher Anthony, Ph. D., Assistant Professor in the School of Special Education, School Psychology, & Early Childhood Studies

What research are you currently working on?

I always have several projects in progress, but the one that I’m most excited about involves developing better assessment tools for measuring what we call academic enablers. Academic enablers are skills, attitudes, or behaviors that aren’t academic skills, but are critical for fostering learning and growing in the classroom and beyond. I focus on four in particular: classroom interpersonal skills (e.g., whether a student can work effectively with peers to complete a class assignment), academic engagement (e.g., whether a student can attend and participate in class), motivation (e.g., whether a student can persist in the face of academic challenges), and study skills (e.g., whether a student can strategically organize materials to more efficiently learn and remember academic content).

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Research Spotlight: Helena Mawdsley

Q & A with Helena Mawdsley, Ph. D., Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education

What research are you currently working on?

Currently, I am working on the motivation and achievement of the college student population in our post-pandemic climate. I am investigating college student reflection on their academic motivation during and after the Covid-19 pandemic to learn if their motivation levels changed during these periods. Additionally, I ask, What do the students believe accounts for the change? I conducted a study titled “’Back to Normal’: Undergraduate perspectives on regaining motivation during the Covid-19 pandemic,” which will be presented at AERA.

I am also interested in the impact of experiential learning on course motivation. Does engaging in an experiential service-learning project outside the classroom correlate with a high level of motivation for that course? I collected data on student motivation during the pandemic when students could not engage in service-learning and then after the pandemic when service-learning resumed. My study called “The impact of service learning on student motivation” will be proposed at the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) meeting this spring.

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Research Spotlight: Taryrn T.C. Brown

Q & A with Taryrn T.C. Brown, Ph. D., Assistant Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning

What research are you currently working on?

My research interests sit at the nexus of Black feminist thought and Black girlhood studies in education. My research agenda thus contributes to the growing scholarship in experiences of Black women and girls through an overarching attention to mapping spatial geographies across time and space, centering relationships in knowledge production and epistemology, and acknowledging the ways Black women and girls document themselves against the archival grain. This collective interdisciplinary work embodies a theoretical extension of intersectionality as a tangible way to support research projects that center equity, advocacy, and culturally sustaining pedagogies both inside and outside of various educational contexts.

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Research Spotlight: Hakeem Hasan

Q & A with Hakeem Hasan, J. D., Senior Researcher at the P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School

What research are you currently working on?

I am currently looking into COVID-19’s impact on public education grades 9-12. Many have hypothesized that the three-year pandemic is going to have long-term effects on student learning. I am attempting to unpack the extent of this so that educators nationwide can have more to think through when delivering instruction at the high school grade levels.

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Research Spotlight: Yiqin Pan

Q & A with Yiqin Pan, Ph. D., Assistant Professor in the School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education

What research are you currently working on?

I leverage quantitative methodologies, including artificial intelligence, statistical modeling, and psychometrics, to address applied issues in educational measurement and to optimize the learning process. Most of my recent research has centered on aspects of test security and personalized learning. My current projects include (i) developing anomaly detection algorithms for identifying potential fraud in tests, (ii) implementing item selection designs by recommendation systems for preventing potential fraud in adaptive testing, (iii) using anomaly detection methods to identify disengagement in learning, and (iv) building recommendation systems to select appropriate learning materials for students. My research has been supported by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).

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Research Spotlight: David Miller

Q & A with David Miller, Ph. D., Director of and Professor in the School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education

What research are you currently working on?

I am currently developing assessments of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education, including assessment standards for fair and equitable evaluation.

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Research Spotlight: Larisa Olesova

Q & A with Larisa Olesova, Ph. D., Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning

What research are you currently working on?

I am working on the effectiveness of a case-based discussions strategy to increase interaction among students. I am also collecting data from various online discussions where different general, role-based, inquiry-based, and debate instructional strategies are used to examine their effectiveness to increase interaction among students. I am studying the levels of students’ interactions by applying social network analysis to understand how to better design online students’ cognitive engagement. In addition, I am currently conducting research on examining engineering students’ cognitive skills in active learning courses using the Community of Inquiry (COI) theoretical framework.

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