School of Education & Social Policy

Grants
Honors and Awards
Publications
$3M Grant Supports Teaching 'Big Ideas' of Science
SESP Scholars Inaugurate Spatial Intelligence Learning Center
Emma Adam Researches Adult Loneliness, Children's Sleep

Grants

Daniel Edelson and Kemi Jona, National Science Foundation Globe Program, "Student Analysis of Data Driving Learning about the Earth (SADDLE), $1,195,604.

Jelani Mandara, Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Greg Duncan, Barton Hirsch and Spyros Konstantopoulos, National Institutes of Health, "The Effects of Parenting and Family Functioning on Adolescent Behavior," $147,796.

Ann McKenna and Lois Trautvetter, National Science Foundation, "Prototyping the Engineer of 2020: A 360-Degree Study of Effective Education," $283,469; McKenna and Uri Wilensky, National Science Foundation, "Exploring the Role of Computational Adaptive Expertise in Design and Innovation," $940,667.

Brian Reiser, National Science Foundation, "A Learning Progression for Scientific Modeling," $2,922,428.

Uri Wilensky and Louis Gomez, National Science Foundation, "Exploring Educational Policy and Change from a Complex Systems Perspective," $749,999.

		Eva Lam was selected to give a keynote address, "Transnational Literacies and Identities in the Digital Diaspora," on February 25 at the National Council of Teachers of English Research Assembly in Nashville.

		Dan McAdams's book The Redemptive Self won an award for best book published in 2006 in the area of psychology and cognitive science from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. The book was also chosen as the 2006 all-campus reading at Valparaiso University's Christ College, where McAdams spoke on "The Making of The Redemptive Self" on January 18.

		Greg Duncan, Aletha Huston and Thomas Weisner, Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children (2007).

		Daniel Edelson, "Environmental Science for All?," Science Educator (2007); "What We Learn When We Engage in Design," in J. van den Akker, K. Gravemeijer, S. McKenney, N. Nieveen (Eds.), Educational Design Research (2006); Edelson, Virginia Pitts, Christina Salierno and Bruce Sherin, "Learning-for-Use in Earth Science," in C. Manduca & D. Mogk (Eds.), Earth and Mind: How Geologists Think and Learn about the Earth (2006).

		Spyros Konstantopoulos, "Trends of School Effects on Student Achievement," Teachers College Record (2006).

		Eva Lam, "Culture and Learning in the Context of Globalization," Review of Research in Education (2006); "Re-envisioning Language, Literacy, and the Immigrant Subject in New Mediascapes," Pedagogies: An International Journal (2006).

		Dan McAdams, "On Grandiosity in Personality Theory, American Psychologist (2007); "An American Life Story" in M. R. Schwehn and D. C. Bass (Eds.), Leading Lives That Matter (2006).

		James Rosenbaum, Regina Deil-Amen and Ann Person, After Admission: From College Access to College Success (2006).

		James Spillane, Eric Camburn and Amber Pareja, "Taking a Distributed Perspective to the School Principal's Workday," Leadership and Policy in Schools (2007).

On the heels of a National Research Council report calling for major changes in the way science is taught in America's classrooms, SESP and the University of Michigan are leading a research effort to improve elementary and middle school science learning. The work is supported by a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

"Studies of science classrooms show that we try to teach too many disconnected ideas and concepts, too superficially," says learning sciences professor Brian Reiser, the grant's principal investigator. "Learning opportunities too often are missed because students are viewed as cognitively unable to understand 'the big ideas' of science until a certain grade or age."

A co-author of the Research Council report titled "Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8," Reiser says that even the youngest children arrive at school with intuitive understandings of the natural world. "Our job is to carefully build on their understanding by introducing the 'big ideas' of science early on and, over time, revisit those 'big ideas' in new contexts and with increasing complexity."

To do that, Reiser and University of Michigan educational researcher Joseph Krajcik are developing a "learning progression" to teach one of science's fundamental practices - scientific modeling. Reiser and Krajcik's three-year research initiative - Modeling Designs for Learning Science, or MoDeLS - is developing curriculum materials to teach the central ideas of physics, chemistry, earth science and biology using modeling.

In addition, it is supporting teacher learning and, across time, conducting studies of elementary and middle school students' growth in understanding scientific modeling. Currently the research group is collecting data on student learning in Detroit, Ann Arbor and the Chicago area, as well as teaching a course to prepare teachers.

MoDeLS collaborators also include researchers at Michigan State University, University of Illinois, Wright State University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Photo: Professor Brian Reiser is leading SESP research on "learning progressions."
(Photo by Mark Swindle)

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SESP Scholars Inaugurate Spatial Intelligence Learning Center

Professors Larry Hedges and Dedre Gentner lead a research group meeting for the new Spatial Intelligence Learning Center.

Professors Larry Hedges and Dedre Gentner lead a research group meeting for the new Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center.
Photo by Martin Woods Image Consulting, LLC

Northwestern researchers are actively exploring children's spatial learning.

Spatial learning is an often-overlooked academic area with increasing importance in a technological society. To examine how to develop spatial learning, researchers from SESP and other schools at Northwestern, together with researchers from three other leading universities, have established the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) with support from a $3.5 million National Science Foundation grant.

Northwestern scholars are collaborating on the new center with colleagues from Temple University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. They are studying spatial learning from preschool through college age and how to develop related skills students need to compete in today's technological workforce.

SILC builds on scholarship by professor of psychology and education Dedre Gentner, associate professor of psychology and education David Uttal, and professor of computer science and education Ken Forbus. Other SESP faculty members central to SILC include Larry Hedges, the Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and of Education and Social Policy, and Louis Gomez, Aon Professor of Learning Sciences.

When older adults have a bad day - feeling sad, lonely or overwhelmed - they have a larger-than-usual increase in the stress hormone cortisol the next morning after waking. Regardless of initial weight, children who get more sleep are less at risk for being overweight five years later. These are among the findings of two widely reported studies by assistant professor Emma Adam.

Adam suggested that the morning increase in the stress hormone cortisol may help cue the body to rev up and deal with loneliness, sadness and other negative experiences. "You've gone to bed with loneliness, sadness, feelings of being overwhelmed, and then along comes a boost of hormones in the morning to help give you the energy you need to meet the demands of the day," she says. Although long-term elevated cortisol is linked with health problems, in the short term, increases in cortisol are helpful, according to Adam.

The five-year sleep study of 2,000 children, on which graduate student Emily Snell is lead author and professor Greg Duncan is a co-author, is the first nationally representative longitudinal investigation of the relationship between sleep and weight in children ages 3 to 18. "Even an hour more sleep at night, due to earlier bedtimes or later wake times, can have a meaningful impact on children's weight five years down the line," says Adam. One additional hour of sleep reduced young children's chance of being overweight from 36 percent to 30 percent and older children's risk from 34 percent to 30 percent, the study found.

Photo: Assistant professor Emma Adam studies cortisol as a biomarker for stress as she researches topics related to human health and development.
(Photo by Treavor Doherty)

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