Headshots of Catherine Bradshaw, Amanda Williford, Colby Hall

Three UVA Professors Awarded Nearly $10M From Institute of Education Sciences

Three new grants will fund faculty research in teacher support and coaching, early childhood education and literacy.

Audrey Breen

Photo (left to right): Catherine Bradshaw, Amanda Williford, Colby Hall

Researchers at the UVA School of Education and Human Development have been awarded three grants totaling approximately $10M from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

Testing An Online Student Engagement Model

Extensive research has shown the Double Check teacher support and coaching model, when implemented in person, has positive impacts on students and teachers, including reducing racially disproportionate discipline referrals, improving student engagement and behavior, and improving teachers’ use of culturally responsive practices. A new $3,999,138 grant, funded by IES, will test the effectiveness of a new online model of the program. The grant will fund 100% of the project.

Catherine Bradshaw, University Professor and senior associate dean for research, will lead this randomized control trial of the online adaptation of Double Check in approximately 20 rural and suburban middle schools, reaching nearly 300 middle school teachers. 

Motivated in part by the COVID pandemic and requests from across the country, the online version of Double Check aims to increase the program’s accessibility to schools all over the country, especially those in rural areas. The new design combines the standard school-wide professional development and individual coaching all into a single interactive, tailored set of modules that allow teachers to engage with the materials at their own pace, and on their own time, making the materials themselves more accessible to educators.

“This online version of Double Check overcomes major obstacles of coordinating schedules and finding professional development time within a school day and throughout the year,” Bradshaw said. “By tailoring the training modules and providing online coaching to teachers, we can make sure we support them when they really need help and when it suits their schedule.”

The online system also sends out “nudges” to teachers to remind them to implement program content, in turn promoting more sustainable classroom practices. 

“With this grant, we will rigorously test whether this online version of Double Check achieves the same or perhaps even stronger effects for students and teachers than the versions we implemented in person that were more costly,” Bradshaw said.

Testing the STREAMin3 Curriculum in Private Childcare Settings

With $3,998,545 in new funding from IES, researchers at the UVA Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) will be testing the effectiveness of their early childhood curriculum in private, center-based childcare programs across Virginia. The grant will fund 100% of the project.

STREAMin3, a birth through five curriculum that focuses on six areas: science, technology, reading, engineering, arts and math, helps children learn skills of connecting and communicating, regulating their feelings and actions, thinking deeply about the world around them, and moving their bodies. In partnership with the Virginia Department of Education, STREAMin3 is already being used is in almost 5000 infant, toddler, and preschool classrooms in Virginia.

“We are super excited to do this field-based trial in private childcare programs because not a lot of research has been done in these settings,” said Amanda Williford, Batten Bicentennial Professor of Early Childhood Education. “Most of the research on early childhood curriculum is done in four-year-old classrooms and typically in either state funded or federally funded programs.” 

Working with 90 private, center-based programs across Virginia, the team will randomly assign programs to the STREAMin3 curriculum for two years of implementation. The other centers will continue using their current curriculum. Teachers implementing the STREAMin3 curriculum will have access to the curriculum and a comprehensive suite of professional development activities created by the research team. 

Following the study, any centers assigned to business-as-usual group will have the opportunity to use the STREAMin3 model.

Improving Middle Schoolers’ Reading Comprehension

The phrase “reading between the lines” may be cliché. But understanding what an author intends by filling in the gaps is a critical part of reading comprehension. 

“When you generate an inference, you are working to understand anything that isn’t literally on the page, which is so much of what we do when we read,” said Colby Hall, assistant professor at the School of Education. “Whether it is accurately connecting a pronoun to its referent or understanding why a character did something, inferring is being awake to what is unsaid in the text.”

With a new $1,999,999 grant from IES, Hall and colleagues are building and iteratively revising an inference instruction curriculum on Actively Learn®, a McGraw Hill digital reading platform. Ultimately, they will pilot test the curriculum with 360 sixth and seventh grade students and their 36 English teachers. The IES grant will fund 100% of the project.

Although the Learning to Generate Inferences and Building Knowledge (LINK) lessons are designed to be used with all sixth and seventh grade students, some components (including technology-enabled supports on the digital platform) may support inference generation and reading comprehension for English learners and students with reading difficulties in particular. Hall and her colleagues are eager to collect data about the degree to which LINK lessons support learning for these groups of students. They will also focus on engaging students in critical literacy practices, and work to ensure that LINK lessons are culturally responsive for diverse classrooms of students.

The four-year study will take place in two urban, public-school districts in Virginia.
 

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