Category: FEATURED RESEARCH

Akihito Kamata, executive director of the Center on Research and Evaluation (CORE) in Simmons, is leading a research partnership between his team and the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD) to improve the quality of pre-K classrooms.

A $400,000 grant from the Institute of Education Sciences will allow researchers to examine pre-K classroom practices in all of the district’s programs.

The purpose of the research partnership is to systematically improve overall pre-K quality through the professional development Dallas ISD provides to instructional coaches and pre-K classroom teachers.

The partnership will focus on differentiating professional development for teachers based on teacher need, focusing on high-quality teacher–child interactions aligned with the CLASS observation instrument and the associated professional development system.

In his study of how adolescents perceive  sexual relationships between students and teachers, Professor Frank Hernandez  sees that ages in a relationship influence judgments of impropriety.

Data reflects that relationships between older students (18 vs. 14 or 16) and younger teachers (21 vs 30 or 40) are less likely to be perceived as wrong and less likely to be reported. But when the power differential between students and teachers was greater, the situations were discerned as more wrong.

Results were published recently in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse. Hernandez and co-authors, Jonathon McPheters and Jamie Hughes, received funding for the study from the Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility at SMU.

 

Associate Professor Candace Walkington received a 3-year, $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in partnership with Assistments and North Central Texas College to research ways to support students in foundational mathematics classes, with the goal to increase and diversify the STEM pipeline.

“Algebra is the relationship between quantities,” says Walkington. “Students use algebra all the time – when they calculate sports statistics, when they compare their social media accounts. They just don’t realize it.”

Walkington will compare approaches to determine which problems help students understand algebra, increase their interest in algebra and deepen their interest in STEM careers. This grant builds on her prior research showing that students learn algebra better when it is connected to their everyday interests.

She is partnering with collaborators Matthew Bernacki at University of North Carolina,  Neil Heffernan at Worchester Polytechnic Institute, Harsha Perera at University of Nevada and Elizabeth Howell at North Central Texas College.

To learn about her research, read this Forbes article.

 

Three Simmons faculty members, Annie Garrison Wilhelm, Amy Gillespie Rouse, and Francesca Jones examine how classroom obervations are conducted and rated in Exploring Differences in Measurement and Reporting of Classroom Observation Inter-Rater Reliability.  

Their article was published in Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, an online peer-reviewed electornic journal.