Professor G. Michael Barnett works with students in his Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) project. Photo: Lee Pellegrini
Associate Professor Karen Arnold and Jennifer May-Trifiletti ’10 (Secondary Education), M.A. ’11 (Higher Education), discuss the dynamics of college life for first-generation college students in a BC News article. May-Trifiletti is a doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia. The article includes Mitchell Strzepek, M.A. ’20 (Higher Education), talking about his experience as a first-generation college student.
Arnold’s longitudinal study on what happens to high school valedictorians after graduation was included in a New York Times opinion piece on “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong.”
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Professor G. Michael Barnett a grant of $1.52 million—his second NSF grant in six months—to support environmental science teachers as they guide their students through authentic science inquiry. Read more in BC News »
Barnett, Professor Belle Liang, and Senior Research Associate Helen Zhang teamed up with the Watertown (Mass.) Children’s Theatre and received a two-year, $300,000 NSF grant to engage local middle school students—particularly those from populations underrepresented in STEM— in science-learning theater experiences. Read more in BC News »
Professor David Blustein received a 2018 Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award from the American Psychological Association. Justin Perry, M.A. ’01, Ph.D. ’06 (Counseling Psychology), nominated Blustein for the award, which is given for motivating a former student to make a difference in his/her community. Perry is the Dean and Kauffman Endowed Chair at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Education.
Boisi Professor Henry Braun, Professor Larry Ludlow, and doctoral students Ella Anghel and Olivia Szendey (Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment) and other Boston College faculty received a Boston College Research Across Departments and Schools grant for the LAMP Measurement Project. They will study how to measure meaning and purpose and develop an instrument with the goal of helping institutions generate evidence regarding their students’ trajectories toward purposeful lives.
Assistant Professor Andrés Castro Samayoa was named a faculty fellow at the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. Castro Samayoa is also a senior research associate at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions.
Marilyn Cochran-Smith was named on the 2018 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, the list of top scholars who help shape educational practice and policy.
The Association of International Education Administrators recognized Professor Hans de Wit with its 2019 Charles Klasek Award for outstanding service to the field of international higher education. De Wit was also appointed chair of the board for World Education Services in January. The non-profit organization is dedicated to helping international students and professionals achieve educational and professional goals in the US and Canada. At Boston College, de Wit serves as director of the Center for International Higher Education.
Tiffeni Fontno, head librarian at the Educational Resource Center, presented “Librarians, Pre- Service Teachers, and Public Schools: A Collaborative Approach to Creating OER K-12 Curriculum” at the Open Education Southern Symposium at the University of Arkansas in October.
Anderson J. Franklin, the Lynch School’s Nelson Professional Chair, presented “Coalition Building for Collective Impact upon Caribbean Health and Wellness” at the Caribbean Regional Conference of Psychology in Jamaica in November.
Assistant Professor Emily Gates co-authored “The 2016 Tips from Former Smokers® Campaign: Associations With Quit Intentions and Quit Attempts Among Smokers With and Without Mental Health Conditions,” an article in Nicotine & Tobacco Research on the effectiveness of a national tobacco education campaign by the Centers for Disease Control, where she was an Office on Smoking and Health evaluation fellow.
Gates and Assistant Professor Raquel Muñiz received a Boston College Research Incentive Grant for “Equitable Systems Change: Learning from Education and Health Cases,” a project to develop practice-based evidence by examining how two education and health compensatory programs envision, enact, and evaluate equitable systems change.
Joan Wasser Gish, the Center for Optimized Student Support’s director of strategic initiatives, addressed student achievement and the successes of Boston College’s City Connects program in an essay for the Washington Post.
Professor Emeritus Andy Hargreaves was named number 19 on the 2018 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, the list of top scholars who help shape educational practice and policy. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Education University of Hong Kong in November and co-authored an opinion piece in The Conversation on math competency among teachers in primary and elementary schools.
Augustus Long Professor Janet Helms will receive the 2019 Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest from the Committee on Psychology in the Public Interest and the American Psychological Foundation. She will be recognized at the 2019 American Psychological Association conference in Chicago, in August.
Lynch School Professor Larry Ludlow, School of Social Work Professor Christina Matz-Costa, and Lynch School doctoral student Kelsey Klein (Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment) co-authored “Enhancement and Validation of the Productive Engagement Portfolio–Scenario (PEP–S8) Scales” in Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development.
Michael O. Martin and Ina V.S. Mullis, executive directors of Boston College’s TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, co-authored “Finding What Makes a Good Reader in a Rapidly Evolving World” in the Global Citizenship Review, first quarter 2019 (pp. 55–57). Martin, Mullis, and Bethany Fishbein, Ph.D. ’18 (Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment), co-authored “The TIMSS 2019 Item Equivalence Study: Examining Mode Effects for Computer-based Assessment and Implications for Measuring Trends” in Large-scale Assessments in Education.
Assistant Professor Gabrielle Oliveira, author of the new book Motherhood across Borders: Immigrants and Their Children in Mexico and New York, discussed the impact on families when mothers in Mexico leave to work in the US on WNYC-Radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Read more about Oliveira’s research »
Associate Professor C. Patrick Proctor delivered “Alfabetización multilingüe: Principios para pensar la educación de estudiantes Haitianos en Chile,” a keynote presentation at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, in October. He also spent a week at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, also in Santiago, running a doctoral seminar on issues of bilingualism and second-language acquisition, with a focus on the Haitian Creole-Spanish bilingualism of students in Chile.
Technology and Engagement: Making Technology Work for First Generation College Students (Rutgers University Press, 2018), a book co-authored by Associate Professor Heather T. Rowan-Kenyon, Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs Ana M. Martínez Alemán, and Mandy Savitz-Romer, Ph.D. ’04, received the 2018 Association for the Study of Higher Education Outstanding Book Award in November.
Professor Dennis Shirley was awarded a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship with the Robert Bosch Foundation in Berlin in 2019. Shirley and Cristiano Casalini, a research scholar with the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, were awarded funding by The Institute for the Liberal Arts to conduct a conference on formation at Boston College in fall 2019. Learn more about formative education »
Assistant Professor Jon Wargo will present the keynote address “Making Noise! Toward a ‘Sound’ Theory of Young Children’s Making” at Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Literacies: An International Conference in Manchester, England, in March.
“Catholic Schools in an Increasingly Hispanic Church”—the study that Patricia Weitzel-O’Neill, executive director of the Roche Center for Catholic Education, conducted with School of Theology and Ministry Associate Professor Hosffman Ospino—is cited in a National Catholic Reporter article on the importance of campus ministers listening to college-age Latinos.
Stanton E. F. Wortham, the Lynch School’s Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean, was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education (NAEd) for his scholarly contributions to education research and policy. The NAEd will welcome its 16 newest members formally at its annual meeting in November 2019.
Lynch School program news
College Road, a partnership between Saint Joseph Preparatory High School and the Lynch School’s Office of Urban Outreach Initiatives, was featured in an article in The Heights.
In fall 2019, the Lynch School will offer a master’s program in Learning Engineering—the first of its kind. It will prepare students to design engaging and effective learning experiences that are informed by the learning sciences and incorporate cutting-edge technologies. Learn more about Learning Engineering »
The Lynch School’s Teacher Education, Special Education, and Curriculum and Instruction program was re-accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation.