Category: March 2019

A treasure-hunting smartphone app developed by SMU and Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT) to help low-literate adults learn to read tied for the grand prize in the competition hosted by the Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE.
The SMU-LIFT team, PeopleforWords, won $1.5 million as a grand prize winner and an additional  $1 million achievement award for most effective app to help adult English language learners learn to read in the competition presented by the Dollar General Literacy Foundation. Using the video game app for Codex: The Lost Words of Atlantis, players assume the identity of an enterprising archaeologist seeking clues to the forgotten language of mythical Atlantis. Keys to finding the lost language are hidden in letter-sound instruction, word lists and consonant and vowel decoding skill-building exercises.
The award for the app, presented on February 7 at the Florida Celebration of Reading in Miami, capped a four-year global competition to develop a smartphone app that created the greatest increase in literary skills in adult learners over a 12-month period. Reading specialists from SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development, game developers from SMU Guildhall graduate video game development program and adult literacy experts from LIFT, a Dallas nonprofit literacy service provider, teamed to develop an award-winning video game that has reaped much more than international honors.
“We are thrilled to be a grand prize winner,” says Stephanie Knight, dean of the Simmons School. “But the important part of this competition is learning the most effective way to help low-literate adults become readers. The development of the app, the data gathered through this process and our partnership with LIFT is just the beginning of bringing the life-changing benefits of reading to low-literate adults.”
The 7,000 players who have downloaded the game and improved their reading skills have left a trail of information that will strengthen the app and provide important data to researchers as well. Data collection is built into the game’s design, says Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU’s Guildhall, assistant professor of computer science and leader of the team of faculty, students and volunteers who developed the game. Each time a player touches the screen, data is collected that records engagement, difficulty and transfer of knowledge.
Read more at SMU News.

Perkins School of Theology is the recipient of a five-year, $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., for an initiative designed to strengthen congregational ministries with youth. Co-directors of the grant are the Bart Patton, director of youth and young adult ministry education, and Priscilla Pope-Levison, associate dean, Office of External Programs.

Entitled “Reboot: The Congregation as Youth Worker,” the initiative will select and resource a cohort of congregations within a 300-mile radius of Dallas without a paid full-time youth worker. The initial cohort of 18 congregations – the “Starter Cohort” – will undergo a discovery process to determine the viability of ministries with youth in their communities and will be introduced to current innovation models for youth ministries. From this cohort, 12 congregations will be selected as the “Innovation Cohort” to apply for resources provided by the grant to build and sustain an innovative model for congregational ministry with youth.
Read more at SMU Perkins.

Professor Barbara Minsker has been honored by the American Society of Civil Engineers with the 2019 Margaret S. Petersen Award for her technical accomplishments, leadership and commitment to mentoring women pursuing engineering careers.
Minsker serves as chair of the civil and environmental engineering department in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering.
She is the author of two acclaimed books: The Joyful Professor: How to Shift from Surviving to Thriving in the Faculty Life (2010) and Discovering the Path of Success and Happiness: Mindful Living with Purpose and Resiliency (2014). From her books, she developed a popular leadership course focused on navigating through conflict and uncertainty that has drawn students from across the SMU campus.
Since the late 1990s, Minsker has successfully advised and mentored 17 Ph.D. students and 24 master’s students. She also leads research to develop innovative systems approaches to improve the sustainability and resilience of human and natural systems.
The award honors Margaret S. Petersen, a pioneer in hydraulics and water resources engineering and recognizes a female member of ASCE or the Environmental & Waters Resources Institute, a specialty organization within ASCE, who has demonstrated exemplary service to the water resources and environmental science and engineering community.
Minsker was previously awarded the ASCE’s Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 2003 and EWRI’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 2005.

Researchers at SMU and UCLA are enrolling subjects for a five-year study of a treatment for a psychological condition known as anhedonia – the inability to find pleasure in any aspect of life. A grant of approximately $4 million from the National Institute of Mental Health will allow professors Alicia Meuret and Thomas Ritz at SMU and Michelle G. Craske at UCLA to study the effectiveness of their treatment in 168 people suffering from this very specific symptom.
“The goal of this novel therapeutic approach is to train people to develop psychological muscle memory – to learn again how to experience joy and identify that experience when it occurs,” said Meuret, professor of psychology and director of SMU’s Anxiety and Depression Research Center. “Anhedonia is an aspect of depression, but it also is a symptom that really reaches across psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders. It’s the absence or the lack of experiencing rewards.”
Historically, treatments for affective disorders such as anxiety and depression have been aimed at reducing negative affect, Meuret said.  Over the next five years, Meuret, Ritz and Craske will treat 168 people using a type of cognitive behavioral therapy aimed at teaching people to seek out and recognize the positive aspects of life – increasing their sensitivity to reward. They will compare their results with a more traditional approach of treating the negative affect side of their problems.
The monitoring of treatment success will include simple biomarkers of enjoyment. “The heart beats faster in joy, something that has been shown to be absent in anhedonia,” said Ritz, an SMU professor of psychology who specializes in studying the relationship between biology and psychology in affective disorders and chronic disease. Other measures will capture immune activity, which is important as an indicator of long-term health.
Read more at SMU Research.