Faculty research: a few examples

Cooperative learning

Brothers and fellow professors in the College of Education and Human Development, Roger and David W. Johnson are the nation’s leading researchers on cooperative learning. They head the Cooperative Learning Center which focuses on making classrooms and schools more cooperative places and on teaching cooperative skills—leadership, communication, decision making, trust building, and conflict resolution. [Cooperative learning]

Curriculum-based measurement (CBM): Student assessment

Stan Deno, professor of educational psychology, developed curriculum-based measurement (CBM) in the late 1970s with the goal of giving teachers of children with learning disabilities a simple set of evaluation procedures that would allow them to literally graph a child's academic progress. [Curriculum-based measurement (CBM): Student assessment]

Dropout prevention

Researchers in the College, including Sandra Christenson, school psychology professor; Mary Sinclair, research associate in the College's Institute on Community Integration (ICI); and Martha Thurlow, director of the National Center on Educational Outcomes, worked with colleagues in Minneapolis Public Schools to develop a program, Check & Connect, to intervene with youth identified as being at high risk for dropping out. [Dropout prevention]

Reforming science education

Reform is a way of life in education. Finding ways to evaluate the effectiveness of that reform in terms of children’s learning is a big priority in today’s atmosphere of more and better accountability in the nation’s preK-12 schools. Frances Lawrenz, professor and chair of the Department of Educational Psychology, is involved in numerous projects, some national in scope, to determine if recent changes in curricula and teaching methods for junior and senior high school science students are improving learning and comprehension.

Educational assessment and accountability

Mark Davison is co-director of the Minnesota Interdisciplinary Training in Educational Research (MITER) program, one of ten federally funded pre-doctoral training programs preparing a new generation of researchers whose ability to apply experimental methodology and cognitive sciences to practical educational issues will place them at the forefront of research and academic endeavors worldwide. He is also the American Guidance Service, Inc. & John P. Yackel Professor of Educational Assessment and Measurement and is researching methods for improved interpretation of test scores. “We are trying to identify common patterns in test scores and the relationships of those patterns. We hope to show how patterns of scores in longitudinal achievement data, in vocational inventories, and intelligence tests can give us information that is effective in helping children achieve their full abilities. We want parents to have a clearer understanding of their children’s test results. And we want to give schools and educators a more solid research base from which to make decisions."

Classroom management

Just about every classroom teacher has a variety of methods to deal with disruptive kids–methods that work for the great majority of situations and have stood the test of time. But as all effective teachers also know, occasionally a child comes along on whom these "best practices" don't make a dent. In fact, interventions that work well with other kids seem to make this kid behave even worse. Jennifer McComas, assistant professor of special education, is working to develop intervention techniques that provide positive outcomes for these hard-to-manage situations.

Access to mental health services

Michael Goh, assistant professor of counseling and student personnel psychology, is looking at ways to remove barriers and improve access to mental health services for refugees and new immigrant populations. One study concerns promoting language access to mental health services by using interpreters in mental health counseling; another is determining best practices in the delivery of mental health services to the Hmong. He also is involved in an interdisciplinary and culture-centered civic engagement psychosocial health project with a Hmong clan.

Integrating special needs students

Christine Espin, professor of special education, and Teri Wallace, research associate in the Institute on Community Integration, have won a $4.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to help special needs students who are integrated into general-education classrooms.

The grant will allow them to work with Minnesota teachers to track the individual progress of integrated special education students while at the same time evaluating those students’ success in general classroom work. This will help teachers meet the sometimes competing goals of federal directives for special education students.

In addition to Espin and Wallace, six other researchers in the College will be involved in the project: Kristen McMaster, assistant professor, special education; Tom Bartholomay, research fellow, Institute on Community Integration; Scott McConnell, professor, educational psychology, and director of community engagement at the Center for Early Education and Development; Susan Rose, associate professor, special education; Stan Deno, professor, special education; and Jeff Long, associate professor, educational psychology.

Latino youth

Michael Rodriguez, associate professor of educational psychology, is examining interpretations of several youth-development inventories from Latino youth, looking for interpretive differences as compared to the interpretations of non-Latino youth. Initial results indicate that Latino youth approach their responses from a more inclusive and family oriented framework whereas non-Latino youth tend to rely on an interpersonal framework. For instance, one developmental marker for youth is gaining independence from family. But for Latino youth, the developmental trajectory is to realize interdependence with family—the individual is defined by membership in family. This changes the interpretation of responses to youth development inventories and alters the way we draw meaning from similar tools used to evaluate youth programs.

Rodriguez also is working with principals, teachers, and staff in the Long Prairie-Grey Eagle school district as they meet the needs of recent Mexican immigrant youth and their families. He began there three years ago when about 60–70 youth were in the schools, only eight in the high school. At that time, no Mexican immigrant student had graduated in the history of the school. Currently more than 220 Mexican immigrant students attend the schools with nearly 40 in the high school. This service work involves intervening in harassment issues, presenting ideas and program plans to staff and school board, providing workshop opportunities on human rights and equality, initiation of a local Spanish radio show (the only one in the region) that is run by a Mexican high school student, and an annual trip with students to the Morris campus of the University for a college visit day.

Response-to-Intervention

Recent reforms allow for using data that assess student response to scientifically-based interventions to make special education eligibility decisions. This provision is commonly called response-to-intervention (RTI). However, Matthew Burns conceptualized RTI as the systematic use of assessment data to most efficiently allocate resources in order to enhance learning for all children. As such, he conducts research to identify how to best accomplish this goal and training in how to implement it.