Nearly $2M in new grants for BC Lynch School faculty

Faculty from the Lynch School of Education and Human Development recently landed a variety of high-profile external grants totaling nearly $2 million for math and artificial intelligence education, and developing culturally informed mental health resources for Asian Americans.

Elida V. Laski, an associate professor of applied developmental psychology, is the principal or co-principal investigator on two recent math education-focused grants.

She, along with professors from Vanderbilt University and the University of Indiana-Bloomington, is the recipient of a two-year, $860,000 STEM Learning Core program research grant from National Science Foundation. Their study will explore the effects of playing an innovative 0-100 board game with features designed to support children pursuing and using predictable number patterns, and understanding place value, number magnitude, and arithmetic. In total, 120 students, ages five to seven, from diverse public schools will participate in the project.

“Understanding the base-10 structure of multidigit numbers is foundational for later mathematics and a key instructional goal, yet many children struggle with formal place value tasks well into elementary school,” said Laski, who heads BC’s Thinking and Learning Lab, and serves as the program director of the Applied Psychology and Human Development bachelor’s program. “Playing number board games is a fun and effective way to improve children’s numeracy knowledge.”

The second award, a two-year, $59,000 grant from the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood—an incubator of research and development projects focused on improving the welfare of young children through age seven—will fund a project titled “Facilitating Parent Math Talk through Games.” Laski and co-principal investigator Marina Vasilyeva, an associate professor of applied developmental psychology, will lead a study investigating how play materials affect parent-child math-related interactions.

“The importance of informal math interactions within the home for future math achievement is so well-established that the issue is not if—but how—to promote the quality and quantity of these interactions,” Laski said.  “Capitalizing on recent research highlighting the link between spatial and numerical reasoning, the project will test the effects of embedding spatial cues of numerical magnitude into play materials on parental math discussions and children’s math outcomes.”

Their project builds upon work demonstrating the importance of games in learning and will contribute to the knowledge of different ways of enhancing herif;"ome math environments via evidence-based play materials.

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Brian TaeHyuk Keum, the Buehler Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology, was recently awarded a two-year, $600,000 Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institutes of Health.

In partnership with Anise Health Inc., a culturally responsive digital mental health and wellbeing platform, Keum will conduct research on improving culturally informed mental health resources for Asian Americans. The goal of the study is to develop proprietary care models, training, and tools to help drive long-term clinical outcomes of culturally literate mental health treatments for Asian Americans.

“Even if we address the issue of stigma and access to mental health resources, there is a systemic lack of culturally informed services catering to the needs of Asian Americans,” said Keum.  “By leveraging the power of technology, a digital mental health platform such as Anise Health can help scale up the availability of such services. This grant allows us to build this foundation and contribute to making mental health services that are respectful of and responsive to the cultural beliefs, practices, and needs of Asian Americans at the national level.”

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A three-year, $2.4 million NSF grant will fund researchers from the Lynch School, New Mexico State University, and MIT to integrate artificial intelligence literacy education into middle and high school classrooms. The project is driven by research indicating that youth’s commonly held misconceptions about the technology hinder their understanding of abstract AI concepts and discourage them from learning about artificial intelligence and pursuing careers in related STEM fields.

The researchers will develop and test the learning trajectories—developmental paths that capture how students develop understandings of new concepts over time—of AI models, associated curricular activities, and assessments for participants in grades 7-10. These trajectories help teachers understand how students learn at different stages and guide curriculum designers to develop learning experiences that are age appropriate for the students.

The BC team is led by Research Associate Professor Helen Zhang, who serves as a co-principal investigator on multiple Lynch School STEM-related NSF grants.

“We’re grateful to the National Science Foundation for supporting our team’s continuous efforts to promote AI literacy education in K-12 schools so that students can become critical consumers and informed citizens who are aware of AI’s ethics-related issues,” she said, noting that BC will net approximately $440,000 of the overall grant.

This project, which launched on October 1, is the third NSF-funded project on AI literacy education awarded to the team; Zhang also served as a co-principal investigator on the prior projects.

“Lynch School faculty continue to be extremely successful in obtaining external funding to support their research efforts, with dramatic increases over the past decade,” said Stanton E. F. Wortham, the Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.  “This reflects the quality of our faculty and the importance of their work. We are excited to have so many high impact projects occurring simultaneously.”