2018 Report on Interdisciplinary Research

2018 Report on Interdisciplinary Research

Dean

David H. Monk

Editor

Annemarie Mountz

Writers

Jessica Buterbaugh, Jim Carlson, Abby Fortin, Annemarie Mountz

Photographers

Jessica Buterbaugh, Jim Carlson, Abby Fortin, Annemarie Mountz

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Contents Dean’s Message

Research by College of Education faculty is making a real difference in people’s lives.

Program combines mobile devices and the outdoors in an unlikely pairing

1 Dynamic assessment can help language learners have more success

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Research combining technology and the outdoors is ‘Transforming Outdoor Places into Learning Spaces’ for children and families.

Research projects help children have inquiring minds about science Julia Plummer likes to shoot for the stars in her research into the teaching and learning of science and spatial thinking.

Researcher seeks to increase college enrollment, success among foster youth

The interdisciplinary work being done by Amy Crosson and her colleagues to help duallanguage learners with reading comprehension also may help students with learning disabilities.

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Inspired by Italian philosophers and Brazilian educators, John Holst and Rebecca Tarlau are exploring social movements, education and sociology with their work in South America and the United States.

Research shows Summer Academy 8 for the Blind is changing lives, attitudes

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Jim Herbert has been involved with the Summer Academy for the past three years and bases his research on the program on untraditional measurements.

Royel Johnson says collaboration among higher education institutions, child and family service agencies and other stakeholders is critical to broadening college access for foster youth.

Research aims to boost dual-language learners’ reading comprehension

Altering or individualizing assessment procedures can propel second-language learners toward more successful mastery of that language, ongoing research by Matt Poehner and his interdisciplinary team suggests.

Professors integrate study of education and Latin American social movements 5

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Penn State College of Education faculty are involved in funded projects for interdisciplinary research totaling more than $20 million.

Read this magazine online: https://issuu.com/pennstateeducation

Dean’s Message College of Education faculty members have expanded efforts in recent years to conduct interdisciplinary research focused on large, cross-cutting issues. A byproduct of this shift has been growth in collaborations with colleagues throughout the University and beyond. This groundbreaking work is relevant and applicable in educational environments in our own backyard, around the world and everywhere in between.

faculty members in our Department of Learning and Performance Systems (LPS) in collaboration with faculty in other disciplines at Penn State, are global in nature and impact. The LPS researchers are working to better understand the role social movements in global settings can play in the development of an educated population.

Our faculty members also are working on research designed to understand the Principal investigators in the Penn State consequences of placements in the foster-care Dean David H. Monk College of Education have seen an increase system for subsequent educational outcomes. of more than 30 percent in funding of their Others are studying how young children learn research in the past year, and our faculty members are about space science in informal learning environments and involved in funded projects for interdisciplinary research the implications for subsequent learning in more formal totaling more than $20 million. settings. Assessment also has emerged as an important research topic and Penn State researchers are developing On the following pages, you can read about several new dynamic assessment tools that are leading to more relevant ongoing projects. Some of this research, like successful mastery of language. the work being done to increase reading comprehension among bilingual students in U.S. schools, involves faculty members located in multiple departments within our College. This project is taking place in two areas of the country with linguistically diverse groups of students and is designed to demonstrate how interventions can bring about different levels of success in different contexts.

These interventions also may be applicable to other populations, including students with learning disabilities.

All of these projects are leading to improvements in the lives of learners of all ages and levels of ability. They are demonstrating the commitment of our faculty members, staff and students to the importance of objective evidence as the cornerstone of the efforts we make to improve educational outcomes for students.

Other projects, such as one being pursued by two College of Education 1

Program combines mobile devices and the outdoors in an unlikely pairing

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n the age of digital technology, mobile devices are good for more than just text messaging and playing games. According to Penn State College of Education researchers, the combination of technology and the outdoors is getting children and their families outside to learn more about science and their communities.

By Abby Fortin That partnership led them to begin interdisciplinary work with the Arboretum and Shaver’s Creek related to supporting rural families and youths to engage in science learning outdoors. Land and Zimmerman began their mobile computing research to create opportunities for people to learn deeply about their communities while having fun together.

Transforming Outdoor Places into Learning Spaces Transforming Outdoor is a College of Education Places into Learning Spaces research and development develops mobile material Photo courtesy of Heather Toomey Zimmerman to engage families with project that takes place at the Arboretum at Penn Penn State researchers Susan Land, left, Chris Millet and Heather Zimmerman test using tablet computers children ages 4 to 12 to for learning science in the Children’s Garden in the Arboretum at Penn State.

State and at Shaver’s Creek learn about life and earth Environmental Center, Penn sciences, including topics $1.5 million Innovations in Development State’s outdoor education field lab and nature relevant to everyday life such as pollination, grant from the Advancing Informal STEM center in Petersburg, Huntingdon County. watersheds, trees and seasonal cycles. The Learning (AISL) program of National Science collaborative research team includes members It is an opportunity for people of all ages to Foundation (NSF). Principal investigator from rural libraries, outdoor learning centers, develop understandings of deeper learning Heather Zimmerman, associate professor of and learning scientists from Penn State, as while engaging in activities on mobile education (learning, design, and technology), well as members of rural communities in devices. and co-investigator Susan Land, associate Pennsylvania. professor of education (learning, design, and The project, which was previously technology), joined forces in 2010 to create a The topics to be investigated at the funded by the Center for Online Innovation Arboretum and Shaver’s Creek through the in Learning, recently received a four-year, research-to-practice partnership.

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program are specifically relevant to rural communities in Centre and Huntingdon counties.

According to Zimmerman, rural communities are underserved by indoor museums; however, they are places rich with outdoor trails, parks and forestlands.

The research project offers an innovative solution to the lack of indoor spaces dedicated to engaging in scientific activities by leveraging the beautiful outdoor spaces as science learning opportunities. The SPACES (Supporting Place-based Augmented Contexts for Engaging Science) system integrates mobile computing into rural outdoor places without ruining the aesthetic experience of being outdoors.

Because the SPACES project brings together educational learning theory, rural communities, science topics and emerging augmented reality technologies, Zimmerman and Land collaborate with scientists in various areas from the local community to the national level.

Scientists consulting on the project include Christina Grozinger, director of the Center for Pollination Research; Harland Patch, chair of the Center for Pollinator Research Arboretum Committee; Erik Burkhart, director of the Shaver’s Creek Plant Science Program; Kim Steiner, director of the Arboretum at Penn State; and Alex Klippel,

professor of geography in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Burt Pursel and Brad Kozlek from the Teaching and Learning with Technology unit offer technological consultation to the project as well.

“The scientists from the Center for Pollinator Research are involved in long-term partnerships with educational researchers, including our team. Interdisciplinary collaboration works so well because of our shared interest in supporting having the general public, educators, farmers and growers, and extension agents learn about pollinators, native plants and local ecosystems,” Zimmerman said.

To accomplish the SPACES educational

research, the team uses a new technology platform that has three components: an online content management system in which science content and activities can be input; a mobile app that family visitors will be able to download near the project’s end; and transmitters which will be placed at key outdoor locations that are detected by the app to provide content in a non-obtrusive manner.

Through this carefully designed system, learners are able to engage not only with the mobile technology, but also with each other and their local outdoor environment.

The SPACES project builds from other successful interdisciplinary collaboration.

Zimmerman has worked with Koraly E. Perez-Edgar, professor of psychology in the College of the Liberal Arts. Together, the psychology-education team was able to add mobile eye-tracking methods to better understand youths’ interest in science-related topics during visits to the Discovery Space science museum. This project resulted in a dissertation project and new publication in the journal TechTrends for College of Education student YongJu Jung.

Photo courtesy of Heather Toomey Zimmerman

Children use augmented reality to virtually see and learn about pollinators in the Children’s Garden in the Arboretum at Penn State.

“When you are studying families or children learning in everyday and informal settings, it is so complicated. As College of Education 3

researchers bring more than one discipline’s methods and ideas, it can help answer the important questions,” Zimmerman said.

Through the interdisciplinary partnership involving Penn State students, such as Jung, Zimmerman added, “students become ambassadors for the disciplines, speaking both groups’ ‘language’ if you will. This allows for further understanding between fields — which can help advance our collective understanding of how people learn.”

The programs not only involve the help of people from multiple disciplines, but they also are located in numerous locations. Despite being based at the University Park campus, Zimmerman, Land and the researchers travel throughout Centre and Huntingdon counties to accomplish this work. They visit libraries and the Shaver’s Creek facility, which is embedded within Rothrock State Forest.

“In our mobile learning work at Shaver’s Creek and the Arboretum, we use methods from the learning sciences and education,” Zimmerman said.

“But, we are bringing in scientists to advise us so that we are helping design activities that support youths and families to engage in the actual intellectual work that scientists do — we call that intellectual work ‘science practices.’”

“The science practices of ecologists, entomologists and botanists change over time. We want to make sure that people learn today’s science practices so that they understand how scientists do the work that 4 Theme Report

they do,” Zimmerman said.

Because of these new discoveries and periodic changes in scientific work, Penn State College of Education learning scientists keep strong collaborations with life scientists. This level of partnership ensures that educational programs are able to help families gain an accurate picture of science.

Zimmerman and Land will be Photo courtesy of Heather Toomey Zimmerman working closely with other collaborators Children examine tree fruit of various species during a field trip to the Arboretum at Penn State. throughout the next offer generalizable design principles for four years to complete technologically enhanced informal learning, the design-based research study, with which will be useful for other organizations support from the grant they received. They with outdoor displays, gardens and trails. will continue to conduct research, create new ways to engage in the outdoors and gather With the help of NSF funding moving data relevant to the study. forward, Zimmerman’s and Land’s research team plans to continue to build knowledge for “Data collection includes video recordings the informal STEM education field. They plan of children and families in the outdoors, to advance collaboration beyond their team by learning analytics of people’s behavior and creating a mobile computing infrastructure for interviews with rural families,” Zimmerman said. “The project’s research design will allow community-oriented outdoor learning. for the development of educational theory, At the end of the project, Zimmerman which supports rural families learning science said the team will be successful if they can within and about their communities.” increase engagement in science topics for rural communities.

At the end of the project, the team will

Research projects help children have inquiring minds about science

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By Jim Carlson

hen it comes to learning about just how much preschoolaged children are capable of while attempting to grasp the concepts of astronomy, Julia Plummer likes to shoot for the stars.

The Penn State associate professor of education (science education) copies the same ambitious philosophies as far as teaching teachers how to teach science and endeavoring to improve spatial thinking among middle school students.

Each topic is its own interdisciplinary research project on a metaphorically crowded table in her Chambers Building office.

Plummer is part of three ongoing ventures in conjunction with collaborators from Penn State and many others from coast to coast.

Her research projects are the Earth and Space Science Partnership; ThinkSpace: Thinking Spatially about the Universe, in conjunction with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, on which she is co-principal investigator (PI); and My Sky Tonight: Early Childhood Pathways to Astronomy, in conjunction with the

Astronomical Society of the Pacific, on which she also is a co-PI. ThinkSpace and Earth and Space Science Partnership are in their latter stages, and papers have been written from the Earth and Photo: Anna Hurst, Astronomical Society of the Pacific Space project based on research on students’ A young student studies the concepts of the solar system in the My Sky Tonight project. Visit http://bit.ly/2OZbNMK for more information about the project. understanding of the and that’s where I always wanted to do solar system and how research,” Plummer said. astronomers investigate the solar system.

But a new grant is being written to continue “I’ve done research in formal settings, ideas on My Sky Tonight, according to classrooms, K-12 and college students, but Plummer, who is collaborating with colleagues there’s something very intriguing about the to propose a symposium to bring people open-ended, free-choice people coming to together with similar ideas for a conference. explore their own interests, the passion you “I suppose there’s something really special see in informal settings that I think is really interesting and exciting. I enjoy some of about working with preschool-age audiences the collaborations I get to explore in those and just seeing what they’re capable of and settings, too.” pushing the boundaries there. I think the other piece of it is I’ve always really been Plummer said the My Sky Tonight project interested in doing work in informal settings started with the Astronomical Society of College of Education 5

the Pacific. “They had been developing curriculum and activities for educators in classrooms and informal spaces.

Everything they’ve done had been done at the fourth-grade level up and never worked in early elementary and never worked in early childhood,” she said.

I’m interested in helping develop materials and curricula that helps young students doing science as a practice so that they are investigating, they’re asking questions, they’re making their own observations.”

In the museum setting, such as Discovery Space, as well as at some local preschools, children were able to do just that. “With the materials we provided and with the support of an expert educator, (children were able) to start making claims based on their own observations,” Plummer said.

“It would be things like relating the location of a light source to the length of a shadow.

“They thought, ‘let’s try to get a grant to develop some stuff for early childhood and get some partners who know something about early childhood.’

That’s when they contacted me and some of the other research partners because of our expertise in early education — astronomy education for younger audiences — and we built the collaboration from there.”

“They were able to explain their understanding of how to produce different-length shadows.

Photo: Anna Hurst, Astronomical Society of the Pacific We were able to see some of My Sky Tonight is in the third Preschool students enjoy a lesson in the My Sky Tonight project. the ways we can support young year of a $2.9 million grant with children’s first evidence-based “They can attend our online professional not only the Astronomical Society explanations in these museum-type settings. development, learn how to work with of the Pacific but also research collaborators We’ve learned more about what we need to children, learn how to run these activities at Cal Poly and UC-Santa Cruz, and museum do to support educators and children and and get the tool kit of activities to use with partners including Discovery Space of Central families to engage in these science practices.” children and families.”

Pennsylvania in State College.

“We’ve been working together to create products and knowledge,” Plummer said.

“We’re creating curriculum or activities for educators to use but we’ve also created professional development for museum educators, park educators, anyone who works with young children – 3- to 5-year-olds – in spaces outside of schools.

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She said her particular focus has to do with helping the children engage in science as a practice, as an inquiry. “They’re coming to learn science for themselves and not something that’s being told to them,” Plummer said. “It’s not just focused on facts and not just about being interested and excited – though both are important – but

Earth and Space Science Partnership

Plummer collaborates with professors Tanya Furman, Chris Palma and Laura Guertin (Penn State Brandywine) and associate professor Scott McDonald on this five-year (plus an extension), $9 million project about improving the quality of instruction and student learning of earth and space sciences

“How do you teach astronomy well?

What should you be teaching? How should be you teaching?” she explained. Based on the design of this professional development, and research they conducted on student learning, Plummer and Palma co-developed and teach SCIED 116, a class for pre-service elementary or middlegrade majors taken as one of three content science classes.

The course focuses on patterns in the solar system and how the model of the solar system’s formation explains those patterns.

The course engages students in this content Photo: Pablo, Astronomical Society of the Pacific through a series of investigations, modeling These preschool students find their own views of the My Sky Tonight project. pedagogy they can use for Pennsylvania teachers and students. with their own future students when they are classroom teachers.

As part of the ESSP project detailed at http://bit.ly/2LkqUOM online, Palma and ThinkSpace Project colleagues developed a series of summer Plummer’s colleagues on this project, professional development sessions to support detailed at http://bit.ly/2LgkBvH online, are astronomy pedagogy for middle school at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, which teachers. is a collaboration between the Smithsonian

Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard University.

A number of Penn State graduate students also assist Plummer, who is a co-PI. The team is in its final year of development and research for two middle school astronomy curricula, focusing on supporting spatial thinking Julia Plummer as students learn to explain lunar phases and the seasons. Spatial thinking is a combination of content knowledge and a way of reasoning about concepts of space, Plummer said.

“When you sit down with them and ask them to explain these phenomena, are they just giving you facts or are they really reasoning in deep ways that we hope will then transfer to new problems? We see them doing the kind of spatial reasoning that we want to see from somebody with deep spatial understanding, who is really thinking spatially,” she said.

“I think that our big finding, and one of the things I’m most excited about, is that our curriculum does seem to improve students’ spatial thinking. The studies we’ve done here show what is possible in ways that I don’t think a lot of people have done before,” Plummer said.

Researchers have found that after middle school students participate in the ThinkSpace curricula, their explanations for astronomical phenomena are more likely to show the type of sophisticated spatial connections that demonstrate spatial thinking.

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Researcher seeks to increase college enrollment, success among foster youth

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arge percentages of foster youth have college aspirations but estimates from research suggest that no more than 20 percent of that population are known to enroll and fewer than half of them actually graduate.

Royel Johnson, assistant professor of education (higher education) and research associate in the College of Education’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, is hopeful that cross-sector collaboration among higher education institutions, child and family service agencies and other community stakeholders can enhance those numbers.

Johnson, in his second year at Penn State, was a part of research team at Ohio State examining the educational experiences of emancipating foster youth. “In Ohio there are about 13,000 youth in the foster care system who have experienced some form of abuse or neglect. And each year more 1,200 emancipate or ‘age-out’ from the system with few, if any, resources to successfully transition to adulthood,” Johnson said.

Youth who emancipate from the foster care system often do not have access to support and resources from family and friends, such as 8 Theme Report

By Jim Carlson many other students benefit from. As a result, they experience difficulties meeting their basic needs such as food, shelter and money, according to Johnson. “Our research focused on identifying those factors that place foster youth at risk but also protective factors that help facilitate their success,” Johnson said.

He said students in the Ohio foster care system shared stories about how being in the system impacted the availability of resources and educational preparation. That ranged from frequent and abrupt changes in school placements as a result of being moved from home to home, low educational expectations and lack of exposure to high-quality teachers and curriculum, according to Johnson. “These challenges, among many others, create sizable opportunity gaps that significantly reduce the likelihood that foster youth can prepare for college,” Johnson said.

“I was really fortunate to be a part of a team committed to engaging in translational research ... applying what we learn through our work to policy and practice, especially within our local context. This led us to collaborate with various stakeholders at Ohio State and across the city of Columbus.

“Complex problems defy singular approaches. The same is true with broadening college access for foster youth. Their educational challenges are so intricate … and interconnected to other systems and policies that no single institution, sector or field of study alone can successfully respond to all of their needs. It requires all of us working together toward a common goal,” he said.

Recognizing the importance of collaboration, he said his research team convened a working group consisting of emancipated foster youth; university faculty, including representatives from the colleges of education, social work and public policy; community leaders; and representatives of city agencies such as child and family services, among others.

One outcome of this group was the development of a pre-college access program to provide foster youth with an opportunity to experience college for a day, while exposing them to information and resources critical for navigating college-going decisions.

“Drawing on insights from our research, we designed a day-long program that we hosted twice a year for three years. The

program consisted of presentations from university representatives, including those who work in academic admissions and financial aid and offered tailored information about preparing college applications and applying for financial aid,” Johnson said.

“What we learned in our work is that some foster youth experience stigma and as a result don’t disclose that identify in the college admissions process, thus not benefiting from programs and resources designed for them … so we wanted to demystify that process.”

Students also met with counseling support services, representatives from child and family services who discussed transitional programs and resources they qualified for, and also heard from other community groups who offered local services, according to Johnson.

“Many of the offices and representatives within the program typically operate in isolation, with little knowledge of what others are doing,” he said. “This program provided us an opportunity to work together, taking stock of all our resources and integrating them in a digestible way for participants.”

participated in the program each semester. They explicitly focused on youth expected to age out of the foster care system, as they are the most at risk.

“These are youth whom the agency was never able to identify permanent Royel Johnson home placements for through adoption.

Many have been shuffled around through various group homes and have stayed with various relatives or friends. They lack stable adult support that’s necessary for college preparation,” he said.

While the program was designed to promote access to higher education “as a valuable pathway for achieving their goals and dreams,” Johnson said the committee also recognized that not everyone will go to college.

To assess and measure program outcomes, surveys were administered at the start and conclusion of the day and students also participated in focus groups, Johnson said.

“We wanted to see if we could detect any changes in students’ knowledge of resources, interest in higher education and confidence in applying the information they learned through the program,” he said.

“Their lack of interest or pursuit of higher education should not be for lack of information, resources, and support,” he said.

“And far too often that is the case for foster youth. Even if the students who decided by the end of the day that college is really not for me, that’s OK, but it shouldn’t be for lack of exposure or resources. All students should have the opportunity to pursue higher education.”

On average, about 40 foster youth who were juniors or seniors in high school

Johnson said his team concluded its research knowing that the students

walked away from the program feeling more prepared, having an awareness of the financial aid and college admissions process and being more knowledgeable about local and federal resources and supports available to them. Having an interdisciplinary crosssector team not only helped reveal some of the challenges foster youth who are aging out continue to experience but allowed them to work collaboratively tailoring and integrating their efforts, Johnson added.

He stressed the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the kind of work where groups such as foster care cut across so many different areas. To that end, Johnson has received a Research Initiation Grant from Penn State’s College of Education for a case study of statewide initiatives across the country to learn the ways in which states are collaborating and working cross-sectors to deal with the challenge of how to increase access for foster youth.

“Cross-sector collaboration has become an increasingly common approach among education leaders to addressing the postsecondary education challenges facing foster youth,” Johnson said. “This study will deepen our understanding of these initiatives while identifying factors that contribute to their viability.

“There is a science to collaboration, especially across sectors. If these initiatives aren’t working together in efficient and sustainable ways their impact will be marginal, at best.

Through this study, I’m hoping to help inform future state efforts,” he said.

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Research aims to boost dual-language learners’ reading comprehension

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quickly growing student population of dual-language learners tends to have much lower high school graduation rates as well as reduced outcomes on measures of reading comprehension and vocabulary, and an interdisciplinary team led by Amy Crosson is researching why that particular population is a vulnerable one.

Crosson, assistant professor of education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in Penn State’s College of Education, is working in conjunction with a group of people in the College’s Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special Education (EPCSE). The team is in the third year of a three-year, $1.5 million grant; they have a no-cost extension period which will enable them to continue working together to analyze the data next year.

The most desirable conclusion of the study, Crosson said, would be to have an impact on overall language development and comprehension outcomes across disciplines and opening up access to engaging in academics across the disciplines for the students.

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By Jim Carlson

“I have always been connected to schools, especially with low-income populations, and thinking about providing the best educational opportunities that we can for students from immigrant families, either first-generation or not.”

— Amy Crosson

“There’s all of this research on biliteralism and bi-literacy showing all of these advantages to learning more than one language,” Crosson said. “There’s that body of research, but there’s this other body of research looking at educational outcomes of students who are bilingual at U.S. public schools and they tend to be overall very poor.

There is this disconnect and we know there is so much potential.

“For the most part we’re not serving the kids the way we need to because they’re not doing well enough; there are too many kids not graduating from high school and not reading at grade level, etc.”

Discovering what can be done about the issue is paramount. “We know that limited word knowledge in English is one of the major obstacles,” Crosson said. “What we’re trying to do here is intervene and that’s with a relatively small, very powerful set of academic words and also some generative word-learning skills to help address that issue of vocabulary knowledge.

“Vocabulary knowledge is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension; it’s really critical for comprehension. We know it’s an area of need but the question is how can we intervene in a way that will promote deep, rapid word growth?”

EPCSE personnel bring invaluable measurement expertise, according to Crosson. Her expertise is in word learning and cognition and the social and cognitive aspects of learning in middle school environments and also bilingualism and second-language learning.

“They (EPCSE) are the critical measuring people; we can’t do our work without them and they can’t do their work without us,” Crosson said.

“That’s where the synergy is and that’s really important.”

The middle school intervention study is addressing general academic vocabulary, according to Crosson. “It’s addressing a set of words that students are going to encounter across disciplines,” she said.

“It will really help comprehension and reading and writing across disciplines. Words like ‘innovative’ and ‘ambiguous’ and ‘analyze,’ those kinds of words that are disciplinespecific, but you really have to know what they mean to be able to make sense of what you’re reading in different content areas.”

Intervention testing will be done versus a control group; thus, reliable, precise measures are vital, according to Crosson. “We don’t want to just know is the intervention effective or not, we want to understand for whom it is effective and in what aspects … in what ways does it have an impact?” she said.

The interdisciplinary aspect helps ensure accuracy. “To address real problems of practice — really meaningful big problems of practice — any single angle of expertise to address educational problems that kind of by their nature are so sticky and large and the issues at play that there are so many, any one angle can’t do justice to addressing major educational issues,” Crosson said.

“We don’t want to just know is the intervention effective or not, we want to understand for whom it is effective and in what aspects … in what ways does it have an impact?”

Crosson said the project is a development study — a series of design-based studies in which intervention has been developed and implemented with different classes of English as a Second Language (ESL) students in the Pittsburgh Public Schools and the Salt Lake City School District.

“I had a relationship with the director of ESL in Pittsburgh Public Schools and I knew about the population there,” Crosson said. “In Salt Lake City, my co-PI, Margaret McKeown, knew people at the University of Utah reading clinic who are also very interested in these issues so that’s when they came up as part of the team.

“In Pittsburgh, we have a linguistically diverse group of students and in Salt Lake City we have a majority of Spanish speakers. Part of our question is, how does the intervention play out in these two different contexts? Based on what we learn from that intervention from that experience, we redesign the intervention and then we try it again. We study the results, redesign it, try it again and this year we’re doing a pilot study,” she said.

— Amy Crosson

“For me, I haven’t had the training to have the kind of expertise that Pui-Wa Lei has for data analysis. At the same time, someone can have very advanced statistical knowledge but they don’t understand the conceptual importance of word learning and some of the issues around instruction and learning processes … then all of that knowledge about data analysis is for what purpose? … So I see them coming together,” she said.

Crosson cited the College of Education for encouraging the building of collaboration across departments. “When somebody who does work that’s interesting to me that I know is a little bit different from what I do but it’s connected, I know that will be supported if I reach out and try to build a connection,” she said.

Crosson also is involved with EPCSE assistant professor Elizabeth Hughes (special education) as well as the Center for Language Science about understanding word knowledge and different aspects about word knowledge and language processing in relation to mathematics.

“We started a really small-scale project but we are working together in really interesting ways to look at multiple-meaning words in math and we’re looking at several different populations,” Crosson said. “We have English language learners and we’re also working with students with learning disabilities or learning difficulties.”

College of Education 11

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By Jim Carlson

ltering or individualizing assessment procedures can propel second-language learners toward more successful mastery of that language, ongoing research by Penn State Associate Professor of Education Matt Poehner and his interdisciplinary team suggests.

Poehner’s interdisciplinary work is centered on dynamic assessment, which seeks to identify the skills that students possess as well as their learning potential, to paint a broader picture of a person’s capabilities. Instead of assigning a student a specific task and simply watching him or her complete it, dynamic assessment entails helpful intervention when problems surface.

“That’s the psychology of it and the education of it is looking at the practice of how we do that,” Poehner said. “I’m interested in languages and working with language teachers or language specialists to design procedures where we do that.

It’s interdisciplinary in that drawing on these different fields and in some cases collaborations with people who might know more about this or that than I do.”

Poehner, who describes his research as sitting at the crossroads of education, psychology and linguistics, focuses primarily on French as a foreign or world language and English as a second language. He’s also dealt with teachers and students of languages ranging from Spanish to Chinese, Russian and Japanese.

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Dynamic assessment can help language learners have more success

Poehner prefers the dynamic assessment approach because early in his career he was designing interactive activities to help his students reach success in language, but he wasn’t sure what to do to determine what type of progression had been achieved.

He began providing his students with standardized multiple-choice tests focused on grammar and vocabulary but felt what he called a “disconnect” between the activities intended to support language learning and the procedures used to assess that learning.

“And that’s what eventually drew me to this work on dynamic assessment, because the idea of me giving you another chance, giving you suggestions, maybe feedback, maybe a model … that feels like I’m doing instructional type things but in the context of

an assessment procedure and looking at how learners respond to it,” Poehner said. “There was something that was just intuitively appealing to that for me.”

One of Poehner’s main collaborators is Jim Lantolf, Greer professor in language acquisition and applied linguistics in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State.

Another is Adam van Compernolle, professor of French at Carnegie-Mellon University. “(It’s good to) bring in different pieces of the puzzle, maybe a stronger language background or different ways to think about collaborations with teachers and learners,” Poehner said.

Poehner urges his students to take a moment to think about something – anything – and subsequently asks them if they used language during that process. “Everyone always says, ‘of course,’” he said. “But can you think without language and that’s the next question. What can you think about when you’re not using language?

“That little internal voice that we have; it’s really hard to think about things without using language. The interesting question becomes, ‘when you start to study a second language, can you use that as a tool for thinking as well? Can you start to think with a second language especially as you become more proficient in that language?’” he asked.

He illustrated that by saying if that language and culture is not just a different set of words for the meanings that you already have but maybe different meanings and different ways of looking at things – different cultures offering different perspectives on the

world – that you’re really offering people new ways of thinking and news ways of understanding the world. “And I think that’s pretty powerful,” Poehner said.

“We know, for example, there is evidence artists can think in images and musicians report they can think in music when they are composing things. If you ask them to think about other things, they are going to start using language. Language is such a powerful tool,” he said.

“You and I can use it to think about music or think about art, but we can also use it to think about our childhood, or make plans for the future, or think about abstract things … it’s really almost limitless.”

A rewarding component for Poehner came during a project he was involved in with a child who was a struggling reader and for whom dynamic assessment was used.

Rather than struggling through reading comprehension tasks, as the child had previously done, he was allowed to interact with the assessor, who provided prompts and feedback throughout the test.

“At the end of the project, after seeing that he could really, thoughtfully work through a process of trying to read text that was difficult for him and answer questions and understand what the text was about, he saw that he had shifted himself from just kind of guessing to being able to work through that process,” he said.

“The kid said ‘it showed me that I had

“By altering or individualizing our assessment procedures the way some of us already do our teaching procedures, I think it can really help more and more learners to realize their success.”

It takes my thinking in a different direction. With the interdisciplinary side of engaging people from other research communities, the flip side of that is the similarities across disciplines and realizing that particular research methods are ones that can cut across different disciplines and conceptual issues and applications of theories that can cut across different areas,” Poehner said.

“Most of the work that I’ve done – probably the majority of it – is in — Matt Poehner collaboration with teachers. Working with teachers, developing procedures, a mind.’ Something like that, just the selfdeveloping materials and then doing a realization that it’s possible when you maybe project where we’re implementing that and haven’t had success and you experience studying what happens,” he said. success, you become aware of your own Poehner stressed that instruction is no capabilities, your own thought processes … I longer a one-size-fits-all process, one in which think that’s really powerful,” Poehner said. the students either respond or they don’t, and that assessment doesn’t necessarily have to Poehner said taking a more be administered the same way for everyone. interdisciplinary approach allows you to have those types of dialogues with people and “I think a really good outcome for this to be reading more broadly so that you’re might be the realization that people have getting exposure to a range of perspectives different backgrounds, different sets of and a range of ways to be thinking about data abilities, different strengths at different and ways of posing questions. points in time,” he said. “In the context of “I sometimes tell students that I read as much outside the field of world language education as I do inside it because I think if I read only inside world languages education, I’m going to be siloed,” he said. “Reading outside of it really kind of activates more creative thinking because I see somebody doing something in another area and I think ‘wow, I never thought about that before.’

language, one person might be very good at pronunciation but have a very limited vocabulary. Another student might be the complete opposite of that.

“By altering or individualizing our assessment procedures the way some of us already do our teaching procedures, I think it can really help more and more learners to realize their success,” Poehner said.

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Professors integrate study of education and Latin American social movements

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By Abby Fortin

ohn Holst and Rebecca Tarlau are exploring social movements, education and sociology with their work in South America and the United States. Their work is both international and interdisciplinary; it is inspired by Italian philosophers and Brazilian educators and made possible through collaboration of colleagues from multiple disciplines.

Holst and Tarlau, who work together within the Department of Learning and Performance Systems in the Lifelong Learning and Adult Education program, have focuses in adult education and both have ties to South America. Before they even knew each other, the two contributed to the same book.

think that book is a good example of folks in education, particularly in adult education, working in an interdisciplinary manner.”

The book, according to Holst, is interdisciplinary in the sense that a number of educators worked on it, alongside people working in linguistics, philosophy, political science and sociology.

Photo: Rebecca Tarlau

Brazilian children study in a public school built in an occupied encampment of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).

Inspired by the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, the book “Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World” includes chapters from an international group of scholars in education, linguistics, political science and philosophy, including Holst and Tarlau.

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Gramsci, whose work is used across many disciplines, isn’t necessarily considered an educator, although many in the field of adult education consider him to be one.

“Whenever we work on topics related to Gramsci or use any of his concepts, we end up running into, or working with, people from multiple disciplines,” Holst said, “I

“Working with co-editor Nico Pizzolato we brought together these chapters from multiple disciplines, from multiple countries around the world, all dealing with Antonio Gramsci from a pedagogical, or educational standpoint,” Holst said. “Some of it is more philosophical inquiry, some of it is based on empirical research.”

Although Holst and Tarlau have been at Penn State for only a short time, they already have integrated themselves into a community of people from many disciplines, specifically by joining a social movement working group.

The group, run by John McCarthy, distinguished professor of sociology, has

members from multiple colleges, including political science professors from the College of the Liberal Arts and faculty in the Smeal College of Business.

Amherst. Also, a book he co-wrote impacted study groups in Bellingham, Washington, during the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

In an effort to bring together more people from a variety of disciplines, Holst and Tarlau are looking to create an initiative that would focus on combining sociology, social theories and social movements with education.

Holst, and his wife María Alicia Vetter, who is Chilean and a researcher herself, recently returned from Chile.

There, they spent time strengthening their connections to Chilean academic and research institutions. Their overall goal is to develop a larger network of people in that region.

“I think John and I being at Penn State is a unique opportunity for us to reach out to other faculty across the university and heighten this interest,” Tarlau said. “We think that Penn State could be a center point for students across the country and the world who are interested in studying social movements and education.”

Not only is their work interdisciplinary, but it is international. Tarlau’s forthcoming book with the Oxford University Press, “Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How The Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education,” is an account of how a major social movement in Brazil has succeeded in transforming the rural public education system to promote more collective and social values.

After spending many years studying social movements and education in Brazil, Tarlau believes the United States could learn a lot from the approaches that are being taken in the South American country.

“We often think about the United States as teaching the Global South, teaching

John Holst

Rebecca Tarlau

poorer countries how they should do things,” Tarlau said, “But I think Brazil and the way that social movements [there] use Freirean education gives great examples to how our social movements could incorporate education in a deeper way.”

Holst and Tarlau also are interested in Paulo Freire, an educator from Brazil. Freire was one of the most important educational theorists of the 20th century, according to Tarlau.

He was also a major inspiration for the social movement that is the focus of her aforementioned book.

Holst was introduced to Freire through his involvement with a community center in Chicago, and has impacted many with his work based around Freirean concepts.

More specifically, an article Holst wrote about Freire is used in the social justice program at University of Massachusetts

Tarlau’s extensive work in Brazil, and Holst’s connections to Chile, are two factors that motivate the two to continue with the work they are doing.

Holst and Tarlau applied for and received a Global Programs Faculty Travel Grant from the Office of Global Programs and plan to use the money to create a yearly study abroad program focusing on education and social movements in Latin America.

“The idea is that it would be a yearly, short-term, summer, study-abroad trip,” Holst said. “We would like to begin with a trip to either Chile or Brazil and then expand it to include Cuba, Mexico or El Salvador.”

With the goal of visiting a different country every year — or even two countries per year to do a comparative study — Holst and Tarlau are working to merge education and sociology with the help of scholars from multiple disciplines continue to make a difference in the way social movements and theory are viewed in connection to education.

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Research shows Summer Academy for the Blind is changing lives, attitudes

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hat better place to prepare high school students with visual impairment for college, than on a college campus?

That’s what Jim Herbert thought five years ago, when he proposed moving the Summer Academy for the Blind from its location at a Johnstown rehabilitation center to Penn State’s University Park campus.

The Summer Academy for the Blind and Visually Impaired is a three-week program that functions with the help of a not-sosmall village. The network of people and organizations that make up the moving parts of the Summer Academy stretches as far as the national level and hits as close as home.

Approximately 25 students with varying levels of vision loss and blindness are accepted into the academy each year and travel from all over Pennsylvania to attend.

Research that Herbert, professor of education (counselor education, and rehabilitation and human services), has done with others since the move has shown that bringing the academy to Penn State was a good idea.

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By Abby Fortin Research also has proven that the approaches coordinators are using are working.

The program has been recognized as one of the “best practices” in the United States and works in partnership with the College of Education and the College of Health and Human Development. It also involves Penn State’s Student Disability Resources office and the Pennsylvania State Office of Vocational Rehabilitation.

“This partnership is not just Penn State, but also the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation,” Herbert said. “Every state is required to provide services to people with disabilities to help them with employment.

There’s a big push now to try to work on what’s called ‘transition youth,’ meaning to work specifically with high school youth with disabilities.”

Herbert, who has more than 40 years of experience in the fields of counselor education and rehabilitation and human services, has been involved with the Summer Academy for the past three years and bases his research on the program on untraditional measurements.

Students’ hope and belief in themselves

is assessed before and after completion of the academy, as well as parents’ beliefs about their children’s capabilities. Student — and staff — success is based on student perception of their skills and the hope they have in themselves.

The academy provides a curriculum that teaches students a variety of skills, such as how to use an ATM, how to go grocery shopping, how to cook meals by themselves and other tasks that those with vision loss or blindness may find difficult.

Academics are taught at the academy alongside the life skills students acquire while attending.

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) is a new component to the program, incorporated as a push to show students with disabilities that there are career opportunities that they may never have thought about before.

“A lot of students aren’t gravitating toward that field,” Herbert said. “But as it applies to people with disabilities, that’s particularly true.”

Faculty within different colleges work with each other to teach classes and skills, but a

large part of what the students learn at the academy seems to be on a social level. With an increase in people who are similar to them that the students encounter in the program, comes an increase in their likelihood to embrace their disability rather than run away from it.

“If you’re excluded, you’re like ‘Where’s my posse? Where’s my crowd? Where’s my support group?’” Herbert said about the experience of exclusion many students face before coming to the academy. “You’re already standing out from the crowd. So, you don’t use adaptive things like a cane.”

There are four goals upon which the ultimate success of the program is based, according to Herbert and the report detailing his research, which was published in the Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability.

“Did they apply to college? Did they get accepted into college? Are they in college? And now we’re at the stage of our research, are they persisting? Are they graduating?” Herbert said.

At this point in the program’s life, those who attended as high school students are now graduating from college. What the research is finding is that these students are not only applying and getting into college at a higher rate than students without sight-loss, but they also are persisting at a higher rate.

Students’ hope and belief in their functional skills is shown to increase positively; a shift in attitude surrounding social relations also is found.

In the post-academy evaluation, a significant change in parent perceptions of their children’s functionality is noted. In the pretest, students reported that they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with their ability to function on almost all of the 24 tasks listed, which was much higher than parental perceptions.

By the post-test, however, parental perception of their children’s functionality increased to nearly the same level as that reported by their children.

As confirmed by research and shown in the data, the Summer Academy for the Blind and Visually Impaired not only has an effect on the participating students, but also on the parents of those students.

Photo: Jessica Buterbaugh

Students attending the Summer Academy for the Blind navigate downtown State College.

The academy helps students become more comfortable using tools such as mobility canes.

This effect can also be seen reaching even further than just students and their families, as student social relationships and relationships with learning are impacted as well.

The impact of the Summer Academy doesn’t end at those who are directly involved with the program, or those who have relationships to students who attend the program.

Since the academy’s move to Penn State, it has influenced the lives of many students with and without disabilities; families affected by vision loss and blindness; and teachers. It now has gone further than that to touch the lives of those affected by hearing loss and deafness.

“We have an opportunity to change somebody’s life for the better,” Herbert said. “When you see a program like this, it has the potential where students start to question what they want out of life, what they see that they can contribute and what they can do. And they begin to kind of challenge that a as a result. That’s the big thing.”

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