Learn about the most recent active external research grants awarded to faculty in the College of Education.

• Janice Byrd, assistant professor of education (counselor education), is principal investigator (PI) of a one-year project, “Kaleidoscopes: Affinity Spaces for Black Adolescent Girls to Promote Growth, Empowerment, and Resistance” that has been awarded $30,000 from the King Family Impact Endowment. This community-engaged project will create a space where Black girls can engage in critical/courageous conversations, radical healing, and empowerment to navigate/combat bias-based bullying, and utilize a design-based research approach to explore their experiences in this group and with bias-based bullying.
• Roy Clariana, professor of education (learning, design, and technology), is PI on a study that received a $274,637 grant from the National Science Foundation. The two-year project, “Further Development of an Open Educational Resource to Improve Architectural Engineering Students’ Conceptual Knowledge When Writing to Learn” is intended to further develop browser-based software that delivers summary writing exercises with immediate feedback to support classroom lecture and discussion in real time. The broader benefits of this project include that the research findings and the software can complement and extend other STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) writing pedagogies. Clariana’s co-PIs on the project are Adrian Barb, associate professor of information science at Penn State Great Valley, and Ryan Solnosky, associate teaching professor of architectural engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering.
• Kathleen Collins, associate professor of education (literacies and English language), is PI of a one-year project, “Sticks and Stones: Disrupting biased-based bullying and exclusionary discipline informed by the stories of minoritized youth” that has been awarded $30,000 from the King Family Impact Endowment. This study is designed to disrupt current patterns of overrepresentation in bias-based bullying and exclusionary discipline through the design of interventions informed by minoritized students' experiences.
• DeMarcus Jenkins, assistant professor of education (educational leadership), is co-PI on a team that was awarded a $512,000 grant from the William T. Grant Foundation for its research, “Choosing Opportunities: Reducing Racial Inequality with Choice Neighborhoods, Wrap-Around Services, and Case Management.” The project examines the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhood Initiative, which was designed to transform racially segregated neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty through mixed-income housing re-development, community-based wrap-around services, and case management. Jenkins’ collaborators on the project are PI Jason Jabbari, assistant research professor at the Social Policy Institute (SPI) at Washington University in St. Louis; Odis Johnson Jr., Bloomberg distinguished professor of social policy and STEM equity at Johns Hopkins University; Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Shanti K. Khinduka distinguished professor at the Brown School at Washington University; Yung Chun, senior analyst at SPI; Sophia Fox-Dichter, a mixed-methods data analyst at SPI; and Kourtney Gilbert, a project coordinator at SPI.
• Matthew Johnson, associate teaching professor of education (science education), and Kathleen Hill, director of the Center for Science and the Schools and associate teaching professor (science education), are PI and co-PI, respectively, of a one-year project, “Implementation and Evaluation of the ARIS Broader Impacts Tool Kit” that has been awarded $24,997 from the NSF. Johnson and Hill are collaborating with a group from Rutgers University, the University of Missouri, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Texas-Dallas to pilot test a suite of tools developed by the Center for Advancing Research Impact on Society (ARIS). The goal of the project is to build capacity for institutions and individuals to do high-quality broader impact (BI) work by releasing the ARIS Toolkit for effective development and evaluation of BI statements in grant proposals.
• Tiffany Nyachae, assistant professor of education (literacies and English language), is PI of a two-year project, “Learning Environment Design and Learning in Social Justice Literacy Workshop” that has been awarded $10,000 from the International Society of the Learning Sciences (Wallace Foundation). This design-based research study of Social Justice Literacy Workshop (SJLW) will examine the extent to which learning environment design assists literacy development and contextualized social justice learning and action among adolescent students of color labeled as "struggling" readers and writers in schools. The project will interrogate teacher and student learning through their co-design and redesign of the SJLW learning environment.
• Matthew Poehner, associate head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and professor of education (world languages education and applied linguistics), is key international collaborator on a four-year project, "Dynamic Diagnostic Language Assessment: Conceptual and Practical Innovation in Foreign Language Education and Assessment," that has been awarded $526,000 from the Academy of Finland. The project draws on two recent assessment innovations in language education, dynamic assessment and diagnostic language assessment, to develop a new framework for identifying abilities and needs among learners of English as a second language. The resultant framework will be implemented as both a computerized language test and a procedure for ongoing classroom-based assessment with students in Finnish secondary schools as they prepare for the National Matriculation Exam required for entrance to university. The PI of the project is Ari Huhta, a professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Information about external grant awards is provided by the College of Education Research Office. Click here for information about all active research projects in the college.