AERA Presentations 2025
Every year faculty and graduate students from each of the academic departments at the Lynch School present their research at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting. AERA is the largest and most prominent interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning.
Representing topics seeking to answer the most pressing questions in the fields of education and human development, our scholars bring diverse perspectives to the Annual Meeting.
Lynch School AERA News
-
2025 AERA Fellow
Dr. Kristen Renn, Ph.D. '98 (Higher Education) was selected as one of the 2025 AERA Fellows by the American Educational Research Association. This prestigious honor recognizes scholars for their outstanding contributions and excellence in educational research. Nominated by their peers, the 2025 Fellows were approved by the AERA Council, the association’s elected governing body. They will be inducted during a ceremony at the 2025 Annual Meeting in Denver on April 24.
-
2025 Outstanding Article Award Recipient
Associate Professor Raquel Muñiz won the AERA Systems Thinking in Education Outstanding Article Award for her article, "A Systematic Review of Critical Systems Thinking (CST) in the Education Field: Gaps and Opportunities for Systemic Change Toward Racial Equity." The committee was impressed by the article's scope, as it examined 30 years of literature to determine how people are using CST. Dr. Muñiz will be honored for her achievement at the annual AERA meeting.
-
2025 Early Career Award
Associate Professor Raquel Muñiz received the 2025 AERA Early Career Award. Dr. Muñiz is celebrated for her exceptional integration of education policy and law, particularly focusing on educational equity. The award recognizes a scholar in the early stages of their career no later than 10 years after receipt of the doctoral degree who has conducted a distinguished program of cumulative education research in any field of educational inquiry.
AERA 2025 Annual Meeting
April 23 – April 27: In-person Meeting in Denver, CO
This year's presentations are listed by date. Select from the titles below to view presentation contributors and descriptions.
Wednesday, April 23
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David B. Miele, Sinwoo Bae
Description: Most of the research on motivation regulation has focused on the strategies that students use to exert control over their task motivation. As a result, relatively little is known about how students come to realize (a) that their motivation has changed and (b) that this change calls for them to implement a particular strategy. Miele and Scholer (2018) have suggested that these monitoring processes are dependent on people’s metamotivational feelings (i.e., sensations and emotions corresponding to fluctuations in motivation), as well as the beliefs they use to interpret such feelings. This symposium will introduce the concept of metamotivational feelings and presents findings from the some of the first studies to examine the role that these feelings play in people’s self-regulation.
Time: 12:40-2:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David B. Miele
Description: According to Miele and Scholer’s (2018) metamotivational framework, there are multiple pathways by which students monitor changes in their task motivation and then decide whether to implement a strategy aimed at bolstering their motivation. One pathway involves responding to experiential cues that capture one’s attention in a bottom-up manner. These cues (referred to as ‘metamotivational feelings’) are thought to emerge automatically when the individual encounters a motivational obstacle (e.g., dull content) that alters their motivational state. Some cues reflect a change in the overall amount or direction of one’s motivation, whereas others provide information about the nature of the obstacle. For example, a student studying for an exam may realize that they are in danger of quitting the activity prematurely after noticing an urge to do something else. They may also notice that this urge is accompanied by a feeling of boredom. Depending on their metamotivational beliefs (i.e., what they believe about how and why motivation changes), the student may attribute the boredom to a lack of interest in the topic or to the way that the information has been presented. In either case, by identifying the obstacle and attributing it to a source, the student is well-positioned to implement a motivation regulation strategy that is tailored to the situation.
In a recent article (Authors, 2024), we extended Miele and Scholer’s (2018) framework by elaborating on the ways that individuals may use metamotivational beliefs to interpret their metamotivational feelings. In the proposed talk, we will discuss the theoretical advancements from the article that are relevant for understanding the phenomena examined in the subsequent talks and point to new directions for research on metamotivational feelings.
Time: 12:40-2:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David B. Miele
Description: Building on the work of Miele and Scholer (2018), we developed a model that explains how differences in students’ awareness of their metamotivational feelings impact their academic achievement and well-being (see Figure 1). The model suggests that, when working on academic tasks (e.g., studying for an exam), students who are more (vs. less) attentive to such feelings and believe that they are capable of controlling their motivation should be particularly likely to implement regulation strategies targeting the specific motivational/emotional obstacles that are undermining their task engagement. Studies have shown some of these strategies to be positively associated with task effort, achievement, and resilience (Fong et al., 2024; Stover et al., 2024). In contrast, students who attend to their metamotivational feelings, but assume that they are unable to control their motivation, may be unlikely to use effective regulation strategies and instead perseverate about negative feelings that have become salient.
As a first step toward testing this model, we constructed a measure that assesses multiple dimensions of students’ metamotivational awareness (see Table 1 for a subset of items). Many of the dimensions were based on a prior instrument that assesses general interoceptive awareness (Mehling et al., 2012). We will present findings from an initial study assessing the structure and predictive validity of our measure.
Time: 12:40-2:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Scott Seider, Kaila Daza, Babatunde Alford, Sarah Fogelman, Brianna Diaz, Hannah Choi, Alexandra Honeck
Description: Critical consciousness refers to the ability to analyze and challenge oppressive forces. Paulo Freire asserted that nurturing students’ critical consciousness should be the primary goal of education so that youth can challenge oppression and transform society. One promising space for critical consciousness work in the middle grades is advisory. This qualitative study explores how educators describe and understand the constraints and affordances of advisory as a space for nurturing middle schoolers’ critical consciousness. One preliminary finding is that some teachers express concern that engaging students in sociopolitical discussions in advisory will weaken students’ feelings of belonging and safety in advisory while other teachers characterize advisory as the ideal setting for such discussions because of those feelings of belonging and safety.
Time: 1:45-3:15 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Scott Seider, Kaila Daza, Sarah Fogelman, Babatunde Alford, Brianna Diaz, Alexa Honeck, Hannah Choi
Description: Cultivating critical consciousness of young people is associated with positive benefits, but teachers face barriers when teaching topics that are perceived to be controversial. In a year-long investigation of five schools, this ongoing study explored the extent to which monthly professional learning communities – designed to prepare educators to teach for critical consciousness – supported doing this work in their classrooms. Early analysis reveals patterns of fears of risk-taking but also action spaces within schools that supported teachers in working through barriers. This paper aims to better understand the ways in which teachers’ perceived fears of risk-taking intersected with their school and classroom communities and the extent to which professional learning communities can play a role in supporting teachers through obstacles.
Time: 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Heather Rowan-Kenyon, Luke Brown, Steph Carroll, Ryan Creps, Mandy Savitz-Romer
Time: 4:20-5:50 p.m.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Zhushan Mandy Li, Xiaohan Qian, Olivia Szendey
Description: Many undergraduate programs have focused on implementing a data science-focused curriculum to meet the increasing demand for data scientists. However, there are no existing instruments to measure the impact of training and curricular interventions. We fill part of this gap by developing a survey instrument to explore students’ attitudes toward data science around four constructs: interest in data science, career aspirations in data science, perceived value of data science, and self-efficacy in data science. We administered 53-item instrument to measure attitudes toward data science to 226 undergraduate students in two waves at a college located in the New England. We conducted Rasch analysis, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), reliability and validity analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis, demonstrating that our instrument is highly valid and reliable.
Time: 12:40-2:10 p.m.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Deoksoon Kim, Noa Rein, Junhyeop Cho, Jiayu Liu, Chuqi Wang
Description: In the less than two years since the release of ChatGPT, there has been an explosion of excitement and fear about its implications for education. Many educators, policymakers, researchers, and others with a stake in K-12 education have made prognostications and expressed opinions. In this literature review, we provide an overview of initial reactions. The paper adopts a sociocultural approach to the question of how AI might intersect with education. We review 36 recent contributions to the literature, and the results describe divergent responses to this new educational tool. We need to move beyond overly optimistic boosterism and overly pessimistic doomsday scenarios, to explore more reasonable responses to the opportunities and challenges that this new technology is already bringing.
Time: 4:20-5:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin
Description: Teachers are acknowledged to play a vital role in our societies. Yet, for various reasons such as workload, job fulfilment and professional status, compensation, among others, there continues to be a global teacher shortage given low recruitment and high attrition rates. A large-scale representative survey of 4173 Singapore teachers across different career stages found teachers’ sense of fulfilment, enjoyment and pride (i.e., affective self-concept) to be the strongest correlate and predictor of retention intention. Informed by what we have learned about teacher-related variables to enhance teachers’ affective self-concept, this paper provides two possible paths to remedy, repair and improve teachers’ retention intention outcomes.
Time: 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Audrey Friedman, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Kierstin Giunco, Charles Cownie, Maria Moreno Vera
Description: Teachers are “whole people” who bring intellect, passion, experience, and learning to professional practice. Formative practices that support teachers’ intellectual, emotional, and spiritual identities serve their full selves increasing productivity, job satisfaction, and retention. This research collected survey and interview data from 26 urban Catholic school principals and 16 teachers in 6 geographic regions in the United States to identify practices, partnerships, and structures that support teacher formation in their schools, and the challenges leadership face around teacher formation. Results show that spiritual leadership that nurtures strong community, teacher-selected and differentiated professional development, emotional care, and workplace spirituality compensated for low pay, suggesting a framework that can improve retention in all educational settings.
Time: 10:50 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ankhi Thakurta
Description: This paper examines how India and U.S.-based urban migrant girls used artmaking to envision more just civic futures in a practitioner study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). As girls from marginalized transborder communities in two of the worlds’ largest and most unequal democracies, they face contextual, yet comparable barriers to civic belonging. These include the marginalization of their civic meaning-making and artistry across settings in the public sphere (e.g., schools). Accordingly, the wider study on which this paper is based explored how critical civic education featuring invitations for creative expression (including artmaking) could support their civic learning and engagement. This paper, which examines how India and U.S.-based girls leveraged their aesthetic resources for speculative civic meaning-making, advances understandings of how educators can support urban migrant girls’ aesthetic civic dreaming across unequal democracies.
Time: 9:00-10:30 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin, Sara Geying Zhang
Description: Despite the prevalence of justice-oriented teacher preparation, there is a gap between teacher educators’ espoused beliefs, practices, and the broader contexts that impact their work. Through the lens of critical and transformative teacher educator agency, we explore the interplay among justice-oriented teacher educators’ agentic capacities and contexts that support or hinder their practices. In this qualitative study, we analyze focus groups/interview data from 35 teacher educators in six U.S. states. Findings suggest that the relationships between contexts and described practices are complex; there is not a linear path between teacher educators who described more supportive state contexts, commitments, and their practices. This study sheds light on how teacher educators navigate multiple competing contexts to achieve professional agency.
Time: 12:40-2:10 p.m.
Thursday, April 24
Department of Formative Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Francisca Carocca, Marina Bers
Description: Integrating computer science (CS) into elementary classrooms has emerged as crucial for fostering problem-solving skills and nurturing innovation among young learners worldwide. This study focuses on a 120-hour professional development (PD) program designed for elementary teachers in Uruguay, aimed at enhancing their readiness to integrate CS using a coding curriculum and ScratchJr. Through a mixed-methods approach, the study examined the impact of the PD on teachers’ readiness, self-efficacy (TSE), and satisfaction with training components. Results indicated that teachers’ readiness to integrate CS in their classrooms and satisfaction with the asynchronous components of the training significantly predicted post-training TSE. Challenges and recommendations from teachers emphasized the importance of tailored, flexible PD and ongoing support to optimize CS integration in elementary classrooms.
Time: 3:35-5:00 p.m.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Martin Scanlan, Andrew F. Miller, Melodie M. Wyttenbach, Elena Sada, Holly C. Hoffmann
Description: This study presents research examining how networks of Catholic schools nurture critical formation of children and adults. The participants are engaged in a research practice partnership (RPP) with three networks of Catholic schools engaged in critical formation. The ultimate goal of this RPP is to develop materials to support educators across public and private sectors in developing innovative and transformative approaches to critical formation.
Time: 5:25-6:55 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Earl J. Edwards
Description: Research acknowledges that students experiencing homelessness are highly mobile (Cowen, 2017; Dhaliwal et al., 2021), however limited scholarship analyses their experiences navigating within and between cities and suburban communities (Colleague and Author). I interviewed LA County youth impacted by homelessness to capture a comprehensive picture of how students experiencing homelessness move within and between school districts, cities, and neighborhoods to meet their academic and physiological needs. This paper builds on student homeless literature (Miller, 2011; Tierney, 2011) by plotting youth resources onto a quality-of-life measure called the American Human Development Index (HDI) to describe networks supporting students experiencing homelessness.
Time: 3:35-5:05 p.m.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Dihao Leng
Description: Limited empirical research exists on examinees’ guessing behavior. This empirical study found that rapid guessers—instead of guessing at random, as commonly assumed in achievement estimation—exhibited a systematic “edge aversion” tendency, particularly favoring “C” and avoiding “E”. This pattern is consistent across various demographics. Psychometric implications are investigated.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Matthias von Davier
Time: 4:30-6:00 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jeneve Swaby, Matthias von Davier
Description: This study investigates the relationships between digital self-efficacy, socioeconomic status (SES), reading confidence on students’ time on task and reading performance in PIRLS 2021. Additionally, it explores how time spent reading relates to digital literacy and the role of nested data structures in influencing these relationships across schools and countries.
Time: 9:45-11:15 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Tianzheng Mao, Matthias von Davier
Description: Traditional moment-based and concurrent-calibration linking methods face potential bias and errors when linking independent calibrations across multilingual groups in Large-Scale Assessment background-scaling. Simultaneous linking (Haberman, 2009) transforms item parameters into a comparable scale while minimizing transformation error. This research tests its feasibility and compares its performance to the alignment methods.
Time: 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jessica Hinson-Williams
Description: In the neoliberal higher education system, ‘successful’ student experiences inside and outside of the classroom involve developing employable skills, building a professional network, and obtaining gainful employment. For disabled college students, however, the neoliberal vision of success is often inaccessible, and disabled students face myriad barriers to participation in both the academic and co-curricular realms. Despite barriers, disabled students have formed campus affinity groups that support their social connectedness, identity formation, and well-being. Little is known, however, about how disabled students challenge neoliberal expectations within these student-led settings. Through the lens of Crip Theory, this study analyzes interviews with disabled students to learn how they resist and reshape neoliberal expectations within their campus affinity groups.
Time: 5:25-6:55 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin
Description: This symposium brings together learning scholars, practitioners, and policy influencers of teacher preparation from across the globe in conversation about innovative practices that are advancing equity in their local and national contexts. Scholars from Finland, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, and the United States will highlight research, practices, and policies in their contexts that seek to repair historic and systemic harm done in educational spaces in their nations and prepare future ready teachers who are equipped to teach all students. Attendees will also be able to engage in open dialogue with the panelists to consider ways that lessons learned can be taken and used in their home contexts.
Time: 9:50-11:20a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin
Description: In this symposium, Asian American researchers and educators will discuss our scholarship with Asian and Asian American youth within the theoretical framework of AsianCrit. We will share our research and personal experiences with Asian and Asian American youth, highlighting the ways Asian and Asian American youth not only experience racialization but also how they respond to, navigate, and resist the hegemonic racist and white supremacist narratives in education and the society that suppress and harm their lives and existence. By bringing AsianCrit scholars and educators together and centralizing voices and lived experiences of Asian and Asian American youth, this symposium contributes to the continued conversation about and engagement with Asian and Asian American youth amidst white-centric and assimilationist schooling.
Time: 1:45-3:15 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: English monolingual approaches to the teaching of elementary reading are dominant within the Science of Reading (SOR) approach that now dominates early reading instruction (Herrera & de Jong, 2023), despite that the elementary aged U.S. schooling population is majority students of Color (NCES, 2021) This presentation draws upon data from a microethnographic study (Bloome et al., 2022) to explore how a teacher, working in a district that adopted an SOR approach to reading curriculum, reimagined reading curricula to incorporate translanguaging pedagogies. The purpose of this study is to examine the co-construction of affirmative stances to multilingualism within a translanguaging approach to reading instruction in a second-grade classroom and students’ responses to these stances set within the SOR discourse.
Time: 9:50-11:20 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: This session encourages cross-“generational” dialogue within the LSP SIG. The workshop will begin with a 45-minute panel featuring mid-career and senior scholars of language and social processes. Following the panel, a 45-minute paired mentoring session will occur. Here, graduate students and early-career scholars will each discuss a manuscript with a senior LSP scholar-mentor with whom they have been matched in advance of the conference based on their scholarly interests and expertise.
Time: 5:25-6:55 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Audrey Friedman, Maria Moreno Vera, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Charles Cownie, Cristina Hunter
Description: There are many challenges in present-day teacher education, in particular, issues of equity that require the preparation of predominantly white teachers to work effectively with diverse student populations amidst a history of racial injustice (Cochran-Smith, 2020; Cochran-Smith & Keefe, 2022). Teacher preparation programs often fail to address the dominance of white cultures and the impact of educators’ positionality on their epistemologies and instructional practices (Salazar, 2018; Souto-Manning, 2019). Transforming systemic racist structures necessitates modifying positionality and epistemology, fostering self-awareness of bias, critical analysis, and an inclusive worldview. This qualitative research explores the positionalities and epistemologies of 21 urban teachers and their manifestation in classroom instruction, guided by anti-bias and anti-racist pedagogy. Findings suggest multiple developmental pathways.
Time: 8:00-9:30 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Eliana Castro (Incoming TCS)
Description: The polarized nature of U.S. discourse around race in the classroom poses challenges for educators and limits but does not foreclose students’ opportunities to see themselves reflected in school learning. Youth who identify as Black, Latinx, or both must negotiate their identities amid anti-Black, xenophobic, and racist nativist rhetoric and policies. In this paper, I interrogate how Afro-Latinx youth in urban high school make sense of the complements and contradictions between the curricula of their world history course, their families’ racial socialization, and other spaces (namely, their city and social media platforms). This paper is part of a larger study aimed at designing history curriculum that reflects the embodied knowledges and espoused beliefs of AfroLatinx youth, their families, and other influences.
Time: 1:45-3:15 p.m.
Friday, April 25
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Shaun Michael Dougherty, Wei Gao, Valentina DIaz Caserta
Description: The researchers conducted ethnographic research of three education-related nonprofits in sub-Saharan Africa in order to better understand processes for sustainability. This work has resulted in a descriptive analysis of the processes of these specific nonprofits in Zambia, Tanzania, and Angola. We offer suggestions for educational nonprofit programs that provide sponsorships or scholarships to children and youth. Our research question is: How do three educational nonprofits in sub-Saharan Africa attempt to ensure successful processes for the children being supported? How do these organizations attempt to be transparent, responsible to local communities, and sustainable over time? More broadly: How might education nonprofits in sub-Saharan Africa implement, support, and evaluate processes for sustainable development?
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Katrina Borowiec, Deoksoon Kim, Susan Martinelli Shea
Description: Arts education can support students’ holistic development by providing opportunities for self-expression and creativity. But funding for public school arts education has substantially decreased in the United States, disproportionately impacting minoritized and lower-income students. This qualitative case study focuses on one community-based nonprofit arts program (dance program) that was developed to teach dance in a school without an arts budget. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with program alumni and staff, artifacts, and public media, our results describe how this program supports whole-person learning in several ways. The immediate impacts of the program include interpersonal development (e.g., empathy), intrapersonal development (e.g., self-confidence), and artistic/creative development. The medium-term and long-term impacts, respectively, include increased community engagement and an enhanced sense of life purpose.
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Nan Yang, Katie Drucker, Yan Leigh, Red Paulin, Gia Pedro, Mary Walsh
Description: Research spanning decades has consistently suggested that children’s lives outside of school profoundly influence their achievement in school. However, before state education agencies and relevant educational policymakers can efficiently address the harmful consequences associated with out-of-school factors (e.g., poverty), it is important for them to understand the landscape of their schools’ existing student support. In response to the need for actionable data to aid in decision-making, we partnered with a Midwest state education agency to administer a state-wide principal survey focused on strengths, needs, resources, and barriers faced by their schools and students. Survey findings unpacked the state’s student support landscape and included particular insights on the student support landscape of historically underserved student populations served by the school.
Time: 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Shaun Michael Dougherty, Wei Gao, Valentina DIaz Caserta
Description: This paper utilizes logistic models, multinomial models, and quadratic growth models, combined with data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and College Scorecard spanning 2002 to 2022, to investigate the institutional factors associated with college closures or mergers. Our analysis pays particular attention to Catholic colleges in comparison to public non-religious, private religious, and private non-religious institutions. The findings reveal that small-sized schools are more prone to closure or merger. Additionally, the growth rate in enrollment varies significantly by institution type over time. Notably, private Catholic colleges initially experienced an increase in enrollment, followed by a decline, suggesting financial challenges and unique vulnerabilities of Catholic colleges in the broader landscape of higher education institutions.
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin
Description: In this session, university-based teacher educators who are all Women of Color, highlight the important work that K-12 Teachers of Color do nationally and internationally in service to minoritized children, caregivers, and communities. Each panelist will offer their perspectives on why it is important to uplift stories of Teachers of Color--particularly in this sociopolitical climate--and share relevant findings from their scholarship.
Time: 9:50-11:20 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: In this presentation, we explore an example of dignity-ing as a “social verb…to understand how dignity is manifested or thwarted in educational activity” (Espinoza et al., 2020, p. 325) by understanding how multilingual paraprofessional teachers and students broadened the construction of personhood beyond dominant and assimilationist models in an English-medium school in a Mid-Southern U.S. border town. We define personhood as “a collectively shared, socially constructed conception of what a person is, what is inherent to being a person, what characteristics and qualities a person has, and what rights and responsibilities are viewed as part of being a person” (Bloome et al., 2022, p. 227). Dominant models of personhood in schooling cause harm and pain in minoritized students’ schooling experiences by narrowly constructing personhood through monolingual, middle-class, Eurocentric and adult-driven norms that deny dignity for multilingual students of Color. By expanding the social construction of personhood to reflect multilingual students’ and teachers’ identities as valued ways of being human, the participants in this study engaged in the microinteractional process of dignity-ing.
Time: 11:40 a.m.-1:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Audrey Friedman, Maria Moreno Vera, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Charles Cownie, Cristina Hunter
Description: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Catholic schools had been experiencing an annual 1-2% decline in student enrollment and number of Catholic schools (MacDonald & Schultz, 2020). This decline in enrollment accelerated after the pandemic, in particular, for urban Catholic schools serving communities of color, some of which have permanently closed. In this study, a total of 28 participants were interviewed, specifically school leaders, teachers, and key stakeholders of urban Catholic schools in the Northeast that recently closed were interviewed regarding their experiences in closing schools, lessons learned, and the impact of this experience. Additionally, data regarding the number of students that transferred to other local Catholic schools or public schools was collected as well as the where faculty either transferred to or if they left the field of education. Our analysis provides insight into many specific actions that are required to close a school in a manner that may help to mitigate some of the short-term damaging effects of the closure within the school community.
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Mollie Hoopes
Description: This conceptual paper presents a religious education curriculum grounded in Integral Ecology (IE), inspired by Pope Francis’ Laudato Si. With increasing diversity in Catholic school enrollment, IE offers a holistic framework that integrates Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and other religious teachings. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of social environment, and spiritual dimensions, promoting social justice and communal well-being. The curriculum moves beyond didactic methods to embrace eclectic and dialogic approaches, fostering deeper relationships with God and the Community. By incorporating students’ lived experiences and diverse worldviews, IE aims to develop individuals capable of addressing societal injustices and promoting the common good. This paper concludes with an example of an IE lesson plan.
Time: 11:40 a.m.-1:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Maria Moreno Vera, Audrey Friedman, Cristina Hunter, Charles Cownie
Description: The growing number of charter schools, school takeovers, and vouchers have significantly increased options for school choice (Schneider & Buckley, 2002). Numerous factors influence Latino parents’ decision making about school choice. This qualitative study is based on interviews with 24 Latino parents, from a variety of backgrounds, whose children are enrolled in urban Catholic schools. Faith emerged as a strong influence on Latino parents’ choice of Catholic education for their children. A phenomenological approach was used to understand these parents’ perspectives on faith formation in their children’s Catholic schools. Findings suggest that faith formation was paramount in decision to enroll in Catholic schools. Understanding the role faith formation plays for Latino families is crucial to serving them in Catholic schools.
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Qinghua Liu
Description: This study explores how Chinese immigrant parents’ personal experiences, intersecting with historical and social contexts, shape their language ideologies, practices, and management strategies. Specifically, it addresses the question: How do Chinese immigrant families develop their family language policy in the northeastern U.S.? Through the examination and coding of field notes and interview transcripts of three Chinese immigrant families in Massachusetts, three key findings emerged. This study sheds light on the complex dynamics of family language policy among Chinese immigrant families, contributing to the broader understanding of bilingual/multilingual education in immigrant contexts.
Time: 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ankhi Thakurta
Description: Scholarship in critical imagination and writing studies has recently demonstrated the potential of youth writing in speculative genres (e.g., fantasy, horror, science fiction) as a way to engage youth in imagining and designing more socially just worlds. This session contributes to this line of inquiry by bringing together six scholars whose ethnographic and design-based research catalogs youth practices in justice-oriented speculative writing and multimodal composing. Drawing on local, national, and internationally collected data-sets of youth composing in speculative genres, the authors trace the critical practices that youth use as they construct critical storytelling experiences that work toward social justice, particularly with regards to intersectional issues of race, gender, and sexuality.
Time: 11:40 a.m.-1:10 p.m.
Saturday, April 26
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David B. Miele
Description: In educational psychology, the dynamic interplay between cognitive and motivational constructs is acknowledged but rarely examined. Studies typically treat cognition and motivation as discrete systems, focusing on how one predicts the other. This may be because it can be difficult to see how cognitive and motivational theories intersect. The present symposium will address this difficulty by showing how the concept of "perceived cost" can be used to bridge cognitive and motivational theories and make nuanced predictions about learning-related phenomena. The speakers will discuss studies that connect costs to a broad range of cognitive/motivational concepts, such as regulatory focus, metacognitive monitoring, remembered success, and cognitive load. The session will conclude with a synthesis by an expert discussant and an open discussion.
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David B. Miele
Description: Research from the judgment and decision-making (JDM) literature has shown that, when making decisions about which activities to repeat, people tend to form biased evaluation of their past experiences. Specifically, Kahneman (2000) showed that, when evaluating past experiences, people tend to weight the pleasure/pain associated with key moments (e.g., the ending) more heavily than the pleasure/pain associated with other moments. Finn and colleagues (e.g., Finn & Miele, 2016, 2021) have extended this work to educational contexts. For instance, they showed that third and sixth graders preferred a challenging math task that included 10 difficult math problems but started or ended with 5 easier problems (which provide students with extra opportunities for success), to a task that only included 10 difficult problems (i.e., the remembered success effect; Finn, 2010; Finn et al., 2023, 2024).
Researchers have tended to explain this effect and similar phenomena in terms of concepts/theories from the JDM and cognitive psychology literatures, such as duration neglect and serial position effects (see Alaybek et al., 2022). Recently, Finn and colleagues integrated these concepts with motivational constructs by showing that the remembered success effects can partly be explained in terms of changes in individuals’ task-specific expectancies, values, and perceived costs (Finn et al., 2023, 2024). However, what is not known at this point is whether experiences of remembered success can also impact these constructs when they are more broadly assessed (e.g., in terms an entire content domain, such as math). We address this question with a particular focus on participants’ perceptions of math-related costs.
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David B. Miele, Meghan Coughlan, Marina Vasilyeva, RoseMarie Rohrs
Description: Recent studies have shown that students’ active participation in the classroom (as indicated by their hand-raising behavior) positively predicts their cognitive engagement and academic achievement (Böheim et al., 2020, 2023). It has been suggested that students are more likely to participate when they are confident in their abilities (e.g., Böheim et al., 2020; Galyon et al., 2012). However, support for this association is mixed, with at least one study showing a nonlinear relation between self-efficacy and participation (Galyon et al., 2012). This suggests that students do not weigh confidence on its own when deciding whether to participate – instead, they compare it to an internal threshold and assess whether they are sufficiently confident about their knowledge, given the risks of participating (e.g., answering incorrectly and looking foolish). The idea that individuals rely on confidence thresholds when forming decisions is consistent with research from the metacognition literature (e.g., Lee et al., 2023).
In a recent series of unpublished studies (Authors, 2022), we demonstrated that college students’ confidence thresholds for participating in their math and social science classes robustly predicted their self-reported participation. In addition, these thresholds were associated with differences in students’ regulatory focus, such that students with a prevention focus in a particular domain (i.e., a focus on safety/security) set higher confidence thresholds and participated less than students with a promotion focus (i.e. a focus on growth/advancement). However, we did not investigate the role that perceived costs play in this phenomenon. For this presentation, we will examine whether costs partly mediate the association between regulatory focus and confidence thresholds. That is, are prevention-focused students particularly sensitive to the costs associated with academic behaviors, and do they weigh them heavily when determining how confident they need to be to engage in such behaviors?
Time: 3:20-4:50 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Cate Schultz
Description: The proposed study I will be discussing for feedback from peers and scholars involves developing and testing a novel intervention that will stimulate children’s interest in science and math and foster deep engagement in self-guided STEM activities within pediatric contexts, specifically for children enduring chronic pain. The intervention would provide children with a sense of control in their science exploration, helping children cope with recurrent pain. By providing something the patients can and do have control over, for example manipulating their own experimental design, control is returned to patients, aligning with the needed autonomy and competence in self-determination theory, especially relevant in medical contexts. This study is being designed and will be revised from invaluable feedback received at the Motiv-Sig roundtable.
Time: 11:40 a.m.-1:10 p.m.
Department of Formative Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jessica Blake-West, Abigail Bergman, Marina U. Bers
Description: This study compares growth rates between task-based and artifact-based assessments in young children’s creative coding skills and examines differential growth patterns among learner groups. Data from 315 K-2 students participating in a creative coding curriculum reveal that students generally performed better on the artifact-based assessment than the task-based assessment. Gender and individual education status (IEP) were the only demographic factors with significant differences between assessments: whereas girls and students with IEPs had significantly lower endline scores on task-based assessments, there were no significant differences on artifact-based assessments. Results highlight the benefits of artifact-based assessments in promoting equitable and inclusive evaluations of student performance with implications for educational policymakers and practitioners in addressing disparities and supporting a diverse range of learners.
Time: 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Katrina Borowiec, Deoksoon Kim, Yoonmi Kang, Stanton Wortham
Description: International students in the United States encountered barriers during the pandemic. This multiple case study of five Chinese international postsecondary students in the United States used interviews, digital stories, and observations to understand students’ experiences with their college’s campus climate and online learning during COVID-19. We also explored how digital storytelling can provide an avenue for self-expression. Participants navigated challenges adjusting to the cultural environment in the U.S. before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with time zone and technological barriers when studying online. Participants’ resilience was illustrated by the vulnerabilities expressed in their digital stories and their desire to empower other international students through storytelling. Music and images from the digital stories provided further insights into participants’ experiences.
Time: 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ummugul Bezirhan, Erin Wry, Matthias von Davier (TIMSS & PIRLS ISC)
Description: This study explores automated item generation (AIG) in PIRLS framework, utilizing GPT models to automate the creation of reading comprehension items. By integrating AI-driven methods with PIRLS item writing guidelines, this research seeks to demonstrate an efficient and streamlined approach to item development to reduce the burden on experts.
Time: 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ali R. Blake
Description: In this workshop, facilitator-presenters will share grounding examples from four collage-as-archiving projects rooted in anti-colonial feminist, queer, and trans histories to invite participants to grapple with political and ethical tensions through collaging (no experience necessary, all are welcome and encouraged). We embrace arts-based methods–specifically physical and digital collage–to engage in counter-storytelling. We are interested in the intimate, connective work these affecting mediums can offer, while also committed to moving with care, creating particular conditions for creation and encounter that recognize ethical and political intensities. We will invite participants to collage as a process of thinking and creating through key ideas in current projects and close with a facilitated discussion about feelings, ideas, and questions that emerged in the collage-creation process.
Time: 9:50-11:20 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Kierstin Giunco
Description: The aim of our broader project is to identify principles for supporting preservice teachers (PSTs) to select diverse texts for instruction and communicate their choices to families in an effort to partner with them. Within this project, we collaboratively designed a caregiver letter assignment, during which we also engaged in collaborative self-study of our planning and implementation of the activities related to this assignment. The following research question guided our study: What can be learned from the process of collaboratively designing and implementing a caregiver letter assignment about diverse texts for PSTs?
Time: 9:50-11:20 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Kyunghoon Son, Lillie R. Albert
Description: This study examines how sociocultural constructs within school contexts influence students' mathematics achievement and internalized values across the United States, Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. Using hierarchical linear regression analysis on TIMSS 2019 data, the study reveals distinct impacts of sociocultural constructs on mathematics achievement in each country. Results indicate that Finnish students were unaffected by greater classroom academic homogeneity, whereas higher achievement variance lowered student scores in the other countries. Socioeconomic status (SES) significantly impacted mathematics achievement across contexts. Additionally, career interest correlated positively with achievement in Finland and South Korea but not in the United States and Singapore. For U.S. students, a sense of belonging to their school and an orderly classroom atmosphere strongly predicted mathematics achievement; however, these variables were not significant in the other three countries. These findings suggest that educational stakeholders should address sociocultural context-specific issues rather than replicate strategies from higher-performing countries to enhance their mathematics education systems and improve student outcomes.
Time: 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ankhi Thakurta
Description: In the White supremacist, anti-Asian structures of U.S. public life, Asian American youth face civic marginalizations that transcend present-day injustices. Besides contending with contemporary instances of racism and xenophobia, they also face the erasure of Asian American histories across public settings (e.g., schools) where White-centric narratives of history are prevalent (Goodwin, 2010). Thus, they encounter few opportunities to grapple with their community civic legacies. In response to these realities, this paper draws on a practitioner research study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) of a virtual out-of-school critical civic education community in which I (an Indian American scholar-practitioner) invited a group of Indonesian American youth to use diverse forms of artistry to surface civically marginalized community and family histories. This group, which ran from Summer-Fall 2021, was a space where youth could explore their familial and communal civic legacies through their multiple ways of knowing. Drawing on data from this project, this paper explores: How, in a virtual, out-of-school civic education community, did eight Asian American youth utilize diverse artistic methods (including collaging) to create a counter-archive of buried Asian American civic histories?
Time: 9:50-11:20 a.m.
Sunday, April 27
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David B. Miele
Description: Some study practices have been particularly effective at enhancing students' learning. These practices include retrieval practice, explanation, metacognitive monitoring, and spacing out learning (e.g., Dunlosky et al., 2013). Yet, relatively less is known about how often students use their study practices across different domains (see Tullis & Maddox, 2020). The present work addresses this gap by examining whether two samples of students were more likely to use certain strategies when studying for their mathematics classes versus their social science classes. Building on a handful of studies that have examined students' general (e.g., Karpicke et al., 2009; Hartwig & Dunlosky, 2012) and course-specific strategies (Yan & Wang, 2021; Zepeda & Nokes-Malach, 2021), we included a eight strategies that involved aspects of retrieval practive (working on practice problems, using flashcards, asking prequestions), explanation, metacognitive monitoring, and spacing out learning. Knowing which domains seem to facilitate (or inhibit) the use of particular strategies reveal the complexity of how students regulate their strategy use and could be a useful way of identifying affordances that can be built into the kinds of support systems discussed by others in this session.
Time: 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Department of Formative Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Francisca Carocca, Marina Bers
Description: This study aims to determine the key elements educators need to consider in localizing a curriculum to engage early childhood classrooms (ECC) in computer science (CS) and literacy powerful ideas. Based on worldwide team experiences’ this study delves into a qualitative analysis to understand the processes, experiences, and challenges to accomplish the adaptation and/or translation of instructional materials, including culturally and linguistically relevant elements to foster identity, enhance skills development, and achieve positive outcomes. By identifying these factors, we developed practical guidelines to navigate the localization process successfully.
Time: 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Zhushan Mandy Li, Jihang Chen
Description: This study analyzes Singapore's digital PIRLS 2021 student data using machine learning methods to address three research questions. First, we applied a Collaborative Filtering algorithm to impute missing values in a sparse dataset, achieving reliable results with a high correlation (0.92) and R-squared value (0.85). Second, we trained an autoencoder to extract significant features from students’ process data, capturing patterns of test-taking behavior. Third, we used K-means clustering to classify students into five distinct groups based on these features. The results indicate clear distinctions in reading achievement among clusters, demonstrating that students' reading achievement has a significant relationship with their test-taking behavior. This showcases the effectiveness of our methods for meaningful analysis and interpretation.
Time: 9:50-11:20 a.m.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ali R. Blake
Description: This paper presents a micro-ethnographic analysis of teacher learning in a 10-week arts & social justice curriculum design project with an organization in the Northeastern U.S. that works at the intersections of arts and disability. Using the lens of social analytic artifacts (Vossoughi, 2014), I introduce the artifact nuancing shared commitments the group developed to move through moments of simultaneous agreement and disagreement. This artifact enabled the group to refine the organization’s approach to justice-oriented arts curriculum based on intertwined commitments to each other and to ever-developing individual and collective politics. This social analytic artifact illuminates mechanisms of collective social analysis applicable in and beyond teacher learning.
Time: 11:40 a.m.-1:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: This symposium presents findings from three papers exploring how teachers and students negotiate belonging, positioning, and personhood through translanguaging pedagogies. We argue that creating translanguaging spaces provides opportunities to remedy longstanding subtractive and assimilatory schooling practices. Yet, within microinteractional moments, possibilities and tensions arise that support or threaten these humanizing aims. We present data from three elementary contexts: a dual language classroom in the Midwest and two English-medium classrooms in the Southeastern and Southwestern U.S. serving students with different multilingual backgrounds. Findings illustrate how translanguaging spaces both have the potential to reposition multilingual students as knowledgeable students who experience belonging, while also presenting tensions related to micro and macro contexts and resources to make these affirming translanguaging pedagogies possible.
Time: 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: When enacting translanguaging pedagogies, teachers are often confronted with an inequitable amount of pedagogical resources across languages beyond English that multilingual students speak in their classrooms (e.g., languages not supported by Google translate, few children’s books in students’ languages). Given these pedagogical conditions, it can be difficult for teachers to equitably enact translanguaging pedagogies for all of their multilingual students. We view few pedagogical resources not just as a pedagogical constraint but also as an issue of linguistic justice closely tied to how linguistic models of personhood (Flores et al., 2016) are constructed in classrooms. In this presentation, we explore how a second-grade teacher effectively incorporated a language with few pedagogical resources (Marshallese) into her translanguaging literacy curricula.
Time: 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Kierstin Giunco
Description: Re-entering data from a two-year RPP between two urban Catholic institutions, this presentation thinks with theoretical concepts from “hauntology” (Yoon & Chen, 2022) to examine how the spectres surrounding race and religion stunted the work of advancing justice. Specifically, we ask “How do the racialized spectres of the past come to shape white teachers’ perceptions of present and future possibilities when engaged in learning around anti-racist pedagogies?” Looking toward the future, we examine the words that teachers charted in year two when re/defining “backup.” Teachers evoked specters of the past and present to express concerns about not witnessing the tangible changes rendered necessary in forwarding social justice within the school. This has led us to ponder if professional learning focused less on exorcising ghosts, and more on facing them to address the underlying causes of their haunting presence can leave behind more constructive inheritances.
Time: 11:40 a.m.-1:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Audrey Friedman, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Charles Cownie, Maria Moreno Vera, Cristina Hunter
Description: This study explores the sense of meaning and purpose in life of 60 urban Catholic school teachers. Utilizing a modified version of the Revised Youth Purpose Interview (Andrews, Damon, Bundick, Jones, Bronk, & Mariano, 2006)(), the research aims to establish profiles of these educators enrolled in a graduate teacher preparation program while teaching full-time in urban Catholic schools. The study investigates how these educators define “meaning” and “purpose,” and examines the issues most important to them. Findings highlight the significance of purpose in promoting positive mental health and optimal human development. The study underscores the role of Catholic education in fostering a commitment to purpose, contributing to the holistic development of educators and possibly by extension, students.
Time: 11:40 a.m.-1:10 p.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Eliana Castro (Incoming)
Description: This invited speaker session elaborates the AERA 2025 theme in its call for research and methods that demand epistemological heterogeneity, expansive views of human learning and activity, and an integrated interdisciplinarity to scholarship and the study of/with Latinx peoples. In this session, scholars who readily boundary cross and work at the edges of their disciplines seek to dismantle racial injustice across educational systems, in the academy, and in the public sphere, and advance expansive representations of Latinx people, their histories, and their possibilities. The proposed presidential session centers new research that aims to trouble/disrupt extant theories, methods, and discourses around the significantly diverse Latinx communities. The resulting re-mediation engages tensions in the scholarship (its concepts and methods) to open up new conversations for the field and the AERA community.
Time: 9:50-11:20 a.m.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ankhi Thakurta
Description: Dominant public discourses frame Asian Americans girls and women as docile and apolitical civic figures (Player, 2021). However, our civic identities are seldom priorities across schools and society. To challenge these prevailing perspectives and omissions, this paper draws on the practitioner study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) of a virtual out-of-school inquiry community in which a group of Indonesian American girls and I (an Indian American migrant woman) explored our places in democratic life. In this group, we inquired into our civic identities and aspirations through multiliterate meaning-making (e.g., discussions, art-making). Drawing on data from virtual community sessions (Summer-Fall 2021), this paper explores the following question: How, in a virtual inquiry community, did eight Asian American girls and one Asian American woman conceptualize and assert civic identities? The paper will highlight how, through our meaning-making, we asserted ourselves as consequential civic actors and resisted the reductive mainstream “storying” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) of our civic identities in and beyond education.
Time: 1:30-3:00 p.m.