ESL; Reading education; Educational measurement; BilingualismEducational assessment; Design and evaluation of literacy interventions for at-risk studentsEducational testing; Learning; Bilingual education; Secondary education; Urban education; Educational technology; Cognitive psychology: cognition, intelligence, memory; Psychosocial development
Biography:
Research Areas and Interests: Learning and instruction; assessment; construction of culture through interaction; and bilingualism; cognitive science, language interaction and social organization (LISO).
Most of my research interests are centered on literacy and learning of persons from varied language and cultural backgrounds, but they are not confined solely to learning in school settings. After obtaining my Ph.D. in Psychology in 1977 I worked at Educational Testing Service in Princeton where I conducted investigations and published research findings on the validity of the SAT, GRE, and TOEFL tests. This work benefited from my graduate training in quantitative and cognitive psychology. One of the main findings of this research was that SAT test scores predict early college grades less accurately for Latino students as compared to other students, but that there was clear evidence of poor schooling preparation of Latino students. Yet despite the latter evidence, I was not convinced that students' true learning potential was assessed adequately by standardized tests. As a result I developed a strong interest in how more effective instruction could be designed to assist academic outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse students who don't perform well on standardized tests and who come from low income families. Enter social constructionism and cultural psychology as new fields for my research.
Since joining the GSE faculty in 1984, I have carried out a research program investigating learning and culture itself as socially constructed. This work has been heavily influenced by the emergence of cultural psychology as a field drawing on the work of the cultural historical or Vygotskian views of cognitive development and activity theory. Our research teams have investigated how classroom interaction leads to the construction of learning expertise, how teachers design and implement constructivist learning activities for students, and how student's self-awareness of their performance leads to new notions of assessment. This research has been funded in recent years by the Center for Research on Education Standards and Testing, and the Center for Research on Education of Students Placed At-Risk.
As our team has pursued research in classrooms, we have realized the value of a more ecologically complex approach to improving educational outcomes. Accordingly, in collaboration with Prof. Betsy Brenner we are now pursuing research on children's learning in after school computer club settings with support from the UC LINKS after school computer club network. Separately, the Mellon Foundation also supports my research on new models of literacy achievement arising through children's computer club participation. Another strand of new research is working with the immigrant parents of students to help them acquire knowledge of how to use computers and how to work with their children on research and publication projects. This latter research is being supported by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence. Concern for electronic technology and its facilitation of learning as a social process is a unifying theme across our research projects.
