Happy Holidays from your OER Team
Wishing you a wonderful holiday season! From Thomasenia Adams, Ana Puig, Brian Lane, Leela Kumaran, Piper Lowinger, Audrey Vilaihong, Chiquita Campbell, Hannah Ewing, and Stephany Rodriguez.
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Spencer Foundation Launches New Initiative on AI and Education
The Spencer Foundation’s AI and Education Initiative seeks to reimagine education in a world transformed by advanced technologies. It focuses on how AI reshapes teaching methods, learning processes, and institutional operations, recognizing both its potential and its challenges. AI offers opportunities to enhance teacher development and reduce administrative burdens but raises critical concerns about equity, such as the digital divide, algorithmic bias, and environmental costs.
The initiative prioritizes:
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Supporting innovative research on AI’s role in education.
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Facilitating collaboration among researchers, tech professionals, educators, and policymakers.
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Expanding public discussions about AI’s impact on education.
This holistic approach aims to balance the promise of AI with its risks, ensuring equitable and effective educational transformation from early childhood to higher education and beyond. For more information, visit the Spencer Foundation’s AI and Education Initiative page.
Register for the AERA 2025 Annual Meeting
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2025 Annual Meeting will be held from April 23–25, 2025 in Denver, Colorado, bringing together educators, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to share the latest developments in educational research. The conference will feature a range of presentations, symposia, and workshops on topics covering various aspects of education, from K-12 to higher education. Registration for the event will open in December and the early bird deadline is February 20, 2025.
The meeting will focus on a variety of pressing educational topics, emphasizing innovation, equity, and inclusive research practices with over 2,500 sessions offered, including paper presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and poster sessions.
Opportunities for collaboration and networking will be available throughout the conference, providing attendees with a platform to connect with peers, experts, and organizations.
Keynote speakers, award ceremonies, and other special events will be featured to highlight the contributions and achievements in the field of educational research.
The full program, including specific session details and scheduling, will be available closer to the event. For more information, visit the AERA 2025 Annual Meeting Program page.
Attend the Upcoming NCES Conference
The National Center for Education Sciences (NCES) Data Users Conference is a unique opportunity for researchers, policymakers, and data users to explore innovative applications of NCES data and tackle critical education challenges. Scheduled for February 11–13, 2025, this virtual event will focus on the theme Responding to the “New Normal” and feature engaging sessions on key topics, including:
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February 11: Identifying and Closing Learning and Achievement Gaps
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February 12: Changes in Pre-K, K-12, and Postsecondary Education
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February 13: Expanding Use of Socio-Spatial and Blended Data to Understand Underrepresented Groups
While the proposal submission period has now closed, attendees will still benefit from insightful discussions, learn from cutting-edge research, and discover innovative strategies for using NCES data, such as data linking, visualization, and blending federal statistics to inform policy decisions.
This free event is an excellent opportunity to collaborate with peers, gain practical knowledge, and explore how NCES data can support efforts to improve educational outcomes nationwide. A detailed agenda will be available in December. For more information, please visit the NCES event page.
New White Paper Series
The Spencer Foundation’s White Paper Series on Culturally Sustaining and Relevant Education (CSRE) highlights the importance of educational practices that affirm and build on the cultural and linguistic assets of students from diverse backgrounds. Research indicates that students thrive when they experience a sense of belonging and when educators incorporate culturally and community-aligned approaches to teaching. This growing body of work emphasizes the need for educational systems to center the social and emotional needs of learners, engage communities and families, and recognize cultural practices as assets.
The commissioned white papers synthesize research on culturally sustaining and relevant teaching and learning across various content areas. For example, one white paper discusses strategies for supporting Latinx students through approaches that validate their cultural and linguistic identities. Another paper emphasizes the need for culturally responsive leadership in schools to foster equity and inclusivity. These papers also explore future directions for research, policy, and educational practices that center cultural sustainability and equity. They provide insights for educators and policymakers to navigate this complex and critical field, addressing systemic inequities while fostering inclusive, responsive practices. By translating these findings into actionable strategies, the series supports efforts to create equitable and affirming educational environments.
You can explore the full series and related topics on the Spencer Foundation’s official website here.
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.
