Please join the School of Education in congratulating its faculty, students, and SOE colleagues in affiliated centers on their achievements over June 2016.

The School of Education monthly achievements is a regular feature of the news section of the SOE website. Please consider sharing recent awards or grants, publications, presentations, and collaborations across campus or in schools.

School of Education shares June 2016 achievements

Institute of Education Sciences Grants

Steven Amendum, Henry May, Allison Karpyn, and Adrian Pasquarella have received a $3.3 million, five-year grant for their project “The Targeted Reading Intervention: Investigating the Efficacy of a Web-Based Early Reading Intervention Professional Development Program for K-1 English Learners.“

Roberta Golinkoff is the principal investigator for a three-year $1.5 million grant for a project titled “Assessing the Comprehension of Language in 2-Year-Olds Using Touch-Screen Technology.” Ratna Nandakumar, Aquiles Iglesias, director of Speech-Language Path at UD, K. Hirsh-Pasek at Temple University, and J. de Villiers at Smith College are co-investigators.

As part of the IES cognition and student learning in special education grant program, Nancy Jordan, Henry May and Nancy Dyson received a $1.5 million, four-year grant for a project  titled “Developing a Fraction Sense Intervention for Students with or at Risk for Mathematics Difficulties.”

Charles MacArthur, Henry May, and Allison Karpyn, along with PhD alumna Zoi Philippakos at University of North Carolina at Charlotte have received a $3 million five-year research grant to conduct a randomized field trial of a curriculum for community college developmental writing courses titled “Supporting Strategic Writers: Effects of an Innovative Developmental Writing Program on Writing and Reading Outcomes.” The research will be conducted at seven colleges in four states.

Ratna Nandakumar and Pamela Kisala have received a research grant for a project titled “Clinical Adaptation of the SCI-QOL Psychosocial Measures.”

Publications

Nigel Caplan, PhD student and a faculty member at the English Language Institute, has published the following articles with co-authors:

• Simpson, S., Caplan, N.A., Cox, M., Phillips, T. (Eds). Supporting graduate student writers: Research, Curriculum, and Program Design (University of Michigan Press).
• Caplan, N.A., & Cox, M. “The state of graduate communication support: Results of an international survey.” (pp. 22-51) in Simpson,S., Caplan, N.A., Cox, M., Phillips, T. (Eds). Supporting graduate student writers: Research, Curriculum, and Program Design (University of Michigan Press).

Nigel Caplan is awaiting the publication of “A dozen heads are better than one: Collaborative writing in genre-based pedagogy” in TESOL Journal with ELI colleague M. Farling.

Robert Hampel is expecting the publication of his article “New Light on the History of Correspondence Schools” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (2017).

School of Education doctoral alumna Zoi Philippakos, Charles MacArthur, and co-authors are expecting the publication of the following articles.

• Philippakos, Z.A., & MacArthur, C.A. (in press). “The effects of giving feedback on the persuasive writing of fourth and fifth-grade students.” Reading Research Quarterly.
• Philippakos, Z.A., & MacArthur, C.A. (in press). “The use of genre-specific evaluation criteria for revision.” Language and Literacy Spectrum.
• Blake, M. F., Mrkich, S., Sancek-Marusa, I., Philippakos, Z. A., & MacArthur, C. A. (in press). “Self-regulated strategy instruction in developmental writing courses: How to help basic writers become independent writers.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College.

School of Education alumna Noreen Moore with Charles MacArthur published the article “Student use of automated essay evaluation technology during revision” in Journal of Writing Research, 8,149-175.

Sharon Walpole with co-author M. McKenna published Organizing the Early Literacy Classroom:  How to Plan for Success and Reach Your Goals. This book is the capstone text for a series they edited titled The Essential Library of PreK-2 Literacy, Guilford Press, 2016.

Presentations

Nancy Jordan, PhD student Ai Ye, and L. Rinne presented a poster titled “Development of Fraction Comparison Ability: Latent Variable Models of Strategy Selection and Change Over Time” at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Math Cognition Conference, Ft. Worth, TX.

Service

 Professional Development

The College of Education and Human Development hosted the Cross-University Collaborative Mentoring Conference (CUCMC) on June 9-10, welcoming graduate students and their mentors from nine universities. The conference provided graduate students studying education and child development a unique opportunity to share their research and receive feedback from faculty and peers at other universities. The planning committee included SOE and HDFS graduate students Dandan Chen, Juana Gaviria-Loaiza, Sara Shaw, and Jordana Woodford, and faculty advisor Marika Ginsburg-Block. A UDaily article on the conference is forthcoming.

As part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Jim Hiebert, Dawn Berk, and the UD mathematics education faculty hosted the Mathematics Teacher Preparation Conference on June 6-8 and welcomed mathematics teacher education faculty from 14 universities. Conference participants learned how to improve their content courses for K-8 pre-service teachers so that their students teach math to children more effectively. A UDaily article on this conference is forthcoming.

Chrystalla Mouza with Lori Pollock (Computer and Information Sciences) and the Partner4CS team, facilitated a four-day professional development workshop for 27 teachers from a number of school districts and public/private schools around Delaware in Virden Center in Lewes, Delaware, held June 20-23. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Delaware Department of Education. Educational Technology graduate students Soumita Basu and Yasemin Cicek attended as student helpers. Read more in Mouza and Partner4CS team lead computational thinking workshop.

Sharon Walpole, her colleague Mike McKenna (University of Virginia), and PhD student John Strong designed and delivered a three-day summer writing institute to kindergarten through fifth grade teachers from three schools in Jefferson County, GA as part of the Bookworms Innovative Approaches to Literacy: Research to Practice grant-funded program. The institute was held May 31-June 2.

New Position

Jeff Fahnoe, an alumnus of the Educational Technology program, has been appointed Chief Information Officer at The WISTAR Institute. Read more about his appointment in this press release.

Professional Development Center for Educators

Events

Jon Manon with John Jungck, Director of the Interdisciplinary Learning Center, helped lead a Student STEM Summer Academy at the ISE Lab on June 15-18, and 20-21. This academy was supported, in part, from a Mathematics & Science Partnership (MSP) grant awarded to them by the Delaware Department of Education.

The Academy involved two dozen Delaware high school teachers as well as ISE Lab faculty and preceptors presenting interdisciplinary problem-based lessons to roughly 60 high school students, many of them from historically under-represented groups. The labs focused on contemporary problems and possibilities including a spectrographic analysis of various sunscreens, the design, building and testing of a solar oven, an exploration of symmetry in both science and art, and the programming of mobile robots called Finches to respond to sensations of light, heat, obstacles, and, ultimately, one another.

Grants

Amy Trauth-Nare and Jenni Buckley (Department of Mechanical Engineering) were awarded $8,125 through Unidel for Winter Session 2017 co-curricular programming, “Engineering Design for Middle Grades STEM Education.”

Publications

Amy Trauth-Nare and co-authors published a book chapter titled, “Promoting student agency in science inquiry: A self-study of relational pedagogical practices in science teacher education” in  Enhancing professional knowledge of pre-service science teacher education by self-study research: Turning a critical eye on our practice, edited by Gayle Buck and Valarie Akerson.

Jackie Wilson is working with Dr. Gary Bloom, author of Blended Coaching and the former Director of the New Teacher Center in Santa Cruz, California, on a Toolkit for Principal Supervisors. It will be presented as a draft to the Principal Pipeline and Principal Supervisor work group on the training and development of principal supervisors. This project is funded by the Wallace Foundation.

Presentations

Amy Trauth-Nare gave the following presentations at the Annual Conference of American Association for Engineering Education in New Orleans held June 26-29:

• Trauth-Nare, A., Buckley, J., & Restrepo, M. (2016). “Results from a pilot implementation of a biomedical engineering program for middle and high school students.”
• Trauth-Nare, A., & Buckley, B. (2016). “Find your center: Using engineering and biomechanics to investigate center of mass.”
• Buckley, J., Trauth-Nare, A., Dearolf, L., Bucha, A., & Lattanza, L. (2016). “Unique extracurricular program recruits women into engineering through orthopaedic biomechanics.”
• Buckley, J., Trauth-Nare, A., Chajes, M., Vaughan, M., Pollock, L., & Stephens, J. (2016). “An efficient FYE course structure for collaborative learning in large lecture courses.”
• Buckley, J., Trauth-Nare, A., Stephens, J., Roberts, D., & Rooney, S. (2016). “Student benefits of multidisciplinary versus single-disciplinary design experiences: A cohort study of a capstone design program.”
• Buckley, J., Trauth-Nare, A., Restrepo, M., & Dearolf, L. (2016). “A population dynamics model for gender diversification in orthopaedic surgery: A case study with relevance to engineering.”

Service

Jackie Wilson, Sharon Brittingham, and Tammy Croce with school officials from the Colonial and Appoquinimink School Districts visited the Prince Georges County School District to observe Principals and Principal Supervisors modeling school walk-throughs and debriefs with teachers. This was an opportunity to observe the district’s succession planning activities in practice and share the model with DE leaders.

Professional development and partnerships

Fran O’Malley

• Worked with 25 teachers from around the state who participated in the Advanced Institute that focused on Elections 2016 in the Democracy Project. The teachers enjoyed face to face interactions with sitting and aspiring elected officials.
• Paired with DBQ Project founder Chip Brady to facilitate a professional development for thirty-five educators. PDCE collaborated with the Delaware Department of Education to offer professional development around the nationally renown DBQ Project’s text based writing Program.
• Invited to serve as an item reviewer for the Smarter Balanced assessment. The work will take place in Denver, Colorado from August 15-19.

Amy Trauth-Nare

• Provided professional development on curriculum alignment to the Next Generation Science Standards to 40 middle and high school science teachers in Brandywine School District on June 13.

Photos courtesy of Nigel Caplan, Yasemin Cicek, and Liliian Miles