Kaitlyn May wins 1st Place in the University of Alabama's Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition!11/9/2020
Six graduate students in the Educational Psychology PhD program received Research Awards at the 2020 Southeastern Universities Graduate Research Symposium (SUGRS). Mona Anchan, a third year PhD student, received an Outstanding Paper Presentation Award for her paper Adding Marginalization, Subtracting Scores, Multiplying Inequities, Dividing People: Low Math Performance Predictors. Two other doctoral students, Sarah S. Hughes-Berheim, a second year, and Kaitlyn May, a third year, received Outstanding Poster Presentation Awards for their posters How we teach vocabulary matters: Do gestures used during word learning influence reading? and Neurofunctional Indices of Executive Functioning in Autism Spectrum Disorder respectively. Three additional PhD students Kelsie J. Dawson, Brian Rivera, and Nahide Gungordu received Poster Presentation Merit Awards for their posters Moral Growth Mindset Measure: Measurement Invariance Among Political Orientations, Neural Basis of Information Transfer in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Pilot Study, and Infant Development and Cortisol: Partial Evidence of a Dynamic System respectively. You can find the posters in the slideshow below or download them from their respective links for better resolution. Congratulations to all award recipients!
 Second year EdPsych graduate student Sarah Hughes Berheim received an Honorable Mention for her submission to the National Science Foundation's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. You can read more about it here. Sarah is part of the Educational Neuroscience concentration and works under Dr. Laura Morett as part of the NERD lab. Here is a description of Sarah's current project titled Exploring the relationship between gesture and reading: The purpose of the project is to investigate how words learned with representational gestures are later integrated into context during reading. We did this by creating an experiment that has undergraduate students learn fake words with both matching and mismatching gestures and subsequently read them in both congruent and incongruent contexts. By using electroencephalography (EEG) during the sentence-reading part of the experiment, we plan to track the N400 event-related potential (ERP), that occurs in response to processing incongruent information. The idea is that if gesture is implicated not only in word learning but also in subsequent reading, then the way we teach vocabulary in schools should reflect this, such that congruent representational gestures should be used to not only facilitate vocabulary acquisition but later comprehension. You can learn more about Sarah and her research here. Congratulations to Sarah! The Center for the Study of Ethical Development awarded $2.5m grant from the Kern Family Foundation2/11/2020
The Center for the Study of Ethical Development has been awarded a grant of $2.5m from the Kern Family Foundation to develop character through school leadership in Alabama.
Core Team: PI - Dr. David Ian Walker (Educational Studies, Educational Psychology) Co-PI’s - Dr. Brenda Mendiola and Dr. Yvette Bynum (Educational Leadership Department), Felicia Simpson We are pleased to announce that this project to develop character through school leadership in Alabama started in January of 2020. Through collaboration with the Educational Leadership program and UA’s Superintendent’s Academy (SA), the project will prepare and support new administrators, principals and future educational leaders to apply a virtue-ethics approach to character development in schools, emphasizing the pursuit of student flourishing as the rightful purpose of education. The program will span four and a half years, and is designed to have a long-term positive impact on K-12 character education in Alabama.  Dr. Macarena Suarez-Pellicioni has joined the Educational Psychology program. Her research interest include mathematical cognition, child development, and learning. She uses both EEG/ERPs and fMRI methods to study these topics. Previously, she had been a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Brain Development Lab at Vanderbilt University. You can learn more about Dr. Suarez-Pellicioni's research here.
We are excited to welcome her into the program!  Graduate students Mona Anchan and Brian Rivera showcased the ELDEN Lab at the 2019 Faculty Research Showcase. At the event, they got an eager volunteer (none other than Alabama's mascot Big Al!) wanting to learn more about EEG research. They connected Big Al to a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) which monitors the electrical brain waves produced by the brain. We are sure Big Al was able to learn all about brain imaging research conducted at the ELDEN Lab. You can see more pictures of the event below. The Faculty Research Showcase is an inaugural event hosted by the Office for Undergraduate Research and the Office for Research & Economic Development. The main goals for this event is to showcase research, research labs, and research personnel to undergraduate students who are looking to get involved and learn more about research in different disciplines. This event is designed to introduce undergraduates to the diversity of research conducted at UA and allow students to network with faculty and graduate students. |
