The identification by a research team that included University of Virginia religious studies professor Benjamin Ray of the execution site of 19 suspected witches more than three centuries ago has been named one of the top 10 archaeological discoveries of 2016 by Archaeology magazine.

Ray worked with Chris Gist, a geographical information systems specialist in UVA’s Alderman Library Scholars’ Lab, to digitally map the area known as “Proctor’s Ledge” – then a prominent rocky outcropping near Salem, Massachusetts, and now part of a quiet neighborhood near a Walgreens pharmacy.

Ray, Gist and a research team led by Emerson Baker of Salem State University pored over maps, court documents and other primary sources, then used digital mapping resources to pinpoint the site of the executions that concluded the notorious Salem Witch Trials.

Rankings Website Lists UVA as No. 2 Public University

College Choice, a self-described “independent online publication dedicated to helping students and their families find the right college,” has named UVA the No. 22 national research university in the country – the second-highest-ranked public university on the list, trailing only the University of California, Berkeley.

UVA “offers both the intellectual resources of a major research university and the intimacy and community of a liberal arts college,” the editors wrote.

The rankings are based largely upon academic reputation, financial aid, net price and graduates’ starting salaries.

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College Choice ranks two UVA schools among the nation’s best: the McIntire School of Commerce and the School of Nursing, both coming in at No. 26. Among specific degree programs, UVA is ranked No. 3 for bachelor’s degrees in economics, No. 10 for undergraduate computer science, No. 11 for its Master of Education, No. 14 for undergraduate chemical engineering, No. 25 for master’s degrees in engineering and No. 41 for undergraduate accounting degrees.

Finally, the site ranked UVA No. 10 among “Colleges and Universities With the Happiest Freshmen.”

Nine Education Faculty Members Named to Influential Scholars List

Nine UVA faculty members have been named to the annual Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, which recognizes the 200 faculty members at U.S. universities who “contribute most substantially to public debates about education.”

The sixth annual rankings – compiled by former UVA faculty member Rick Hess, now a member of the American Enterprise Institute – were published Wednesday in Hess’ Education Week blog, “Rick Hess Straight Up.” They are based upon a variety of metrics that “recognize university-based scholars in the U.S. who are contributing most substantially to public debates about education,” including measures of publishing and press, Web and social media citations, according to Hess’ explanation.

Three UVA faculty members, including two leaders of UVA’s Curry School of Education, earned spots in the top 25. Carol Tomlinson, William Clay Parrish Jr. Professor and chair of Curry’s Educational Leadership, Foundations and Policy Department, rose to the 13th slot. Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences and a scholar affiliated with Curry’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, ranked No. 18, and Curry School Dean Robert Pianta was rated the 25th-most influential university-based scholar.

Returning influential scholars include a host from Curry’s Education Policy program. Professor Jim Wyckoff rose to No. 134. Education policy professor Sarah Turner (No. 163), assistant professor Daphna Bassok (No. 174), and assistant professor Ben Castleman (No. 188) also made the list.

Faculty from the higher education program were also recognized for their influence. Associate sociology professor Josipa Roksa ranked No. 125 and Michelle Young, a professor of educational leadership and policy who directs the University Council for Educational Administration, moved up to No. 167.

“The importance of our engagement as scholars in deliberations concerning policy cannot be understated,” Pianta said. “And the fact that our influence spans preschool to higher education shows the breadth of talent here at the University. As the country and states move to shape public education in the U.S., the University and Curry School will be a ‘go-to’ place for advice and solutions.”

Obama Appoints Willingham to Education Board

President Barack Obama announced Jan. 6 his intent to appoint UVA psychology professor Daniel Willingham to the board of directors of the National Board for Education Sciences, which oversees the Institute of Education Sciences – the statistics, research and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

Willingham, who joined the UVA faculty in 1992, is the author of “Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do,” “Why Don’t Students Like School?” and “When Can You Trust the Experts?” He is a contributor to American Educator magazine and a member of the Advisory Committee for Learning and the Brain. 

Engineering Professor Gets Double Dose of Good News to End 2016

Barry Johnson, L.A. Lacy Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received two prestigious appointments last month.

On Dec. 13, he was among 175 leaders of academic invention who were elected fellows of the National Academy of Inventors. Also last month, he was named acting assistant director for the Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

According to the announcement, “Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and welfare of society.”

The newest fellows will be inducted April 6 as part of the sixth annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors, to be held in Boston. Fellows will be presented with a special trophy, medal and rosette pin.

Those elected to the rank of fellow are named inventors on U.S. patents and were nominated by their peers for contributions to innovation in areas such as patents and licensing, innovative discovery and technology, significant impact on society, and support and enhancement of innovation.

Johnson is one of five current or former UVA faculty members elected fellows of the NAI, including Jayakrishna Ambati, Joseph Campbell, the late John C. Herr and Thomas C. Skalak.

At the National Science Foundation, Johnson, currently on leave from the University, had been serving as acting deputy assistant director and division director for industrial innovation and partnerships within the Engineering Directorate. In his new post as acting assistant director, he will report directly to NSF Director France Córdova.

UVA Honored Nationally for Bariatric Surgery, Cancer Care

The UVA Medical Center’s bariatric surgery and cancer care programs have earned 2017 national Women’s Choice Awards from WomenCertified Inc.

The UVA Cancer Center earned its America’s Best Hospitals for Cancer Care award based on criteria that include the availability of comprehensive patient care and research, as well as patient satisfaction. Award-winning hospitals must be accredited by the American College of Surgeons’ Commission on Cancer and are evaluated based on their patient recommendation rating from the federal Hospital Consumer Assessment for Healthcare Providers and Systems survey.

“I am pleased to see our team recognized not only for our high-quality care and research, but also for providing care that is focused on the patient’s needs,” said Dr. Thomas P. Loughran Jr., director of the UVA Cancer Center.

UVA earned its America’s Best Hospitals for Bariatric Surgery award by meeting criteria that include providing high-quality care and better-than-average patient satisfaction. To earn the award, bariatric surgery programs – which perform weight-loss surgery – must be accredited through the national Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program and receive a patient recommendation on the Hospital Consumer Assessment for Healthcare Providers and Systems survey that is better than the national average.

“We are proud to be honored for our efforts to help patients lose weight and live healthier with our comprehensive treatment options and patient-centered approach,” Dr. Peter T. Hallowell, director of UVA’s bariatric surgery program, said.

Law Professor Named to Board of Prestigious Environmental Law Institute

School of Law professor Jonathan Cannon has been named to a three-year term on the board of the prestigious Environmental Law Institute.

The nonprofit think tank convenes experts from diverse backgrounds to analyze complex environmental challenges, disseminates recommendations on environmental topics and helps train future environmental law leaders.

The group specializes in producing research publications and sponsoring forums that target legal practitioners, environmental organizations and others, such as business leaders, whose decisions affect the environment both in the U.S and abroad.

Cannon, who directs the Law School’s Environmental and Land Use Law Program, joined the UVA Law faculty in 1998 from the Environmental Protection Agency, where he was general counsel (1995-98) and assistant administrator for administration and resources management (1992-95).

He is currently the Blaine T. Phillips Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law and the Hunton & Williams Professor of Law at UVA. His most recent book is “Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court.”

Student’s International Tax Law Paper Wins Major Writing Competition

Amanda Leon, a third-year law student from Grayslake, Illinois, has won first place in the International Fiscal Association USA Branch 2016 Writing Competition.  

Leon will attend the association’s February conference in New York, and her paper is being considered for publication in Bloomberg BNA’s Tax Management International Journal.

The paper, “If the Commission ‘LOBs’ a Pitch to the ECJ, Will It Strike Out Again?” tied for the award. It looks at a 2015 European Commission infringement action against the Netherlands and explains how a potential court case stemming from that action could have a major impact on international tax law – specifically, the enforcement of limitation-of-benefits clauses, or LOBs.

She credits UVA Law Professor Ruth Mason for getting her interested in the topic during “EU Taxation,” Mason’s spring seminar class. As a former CPA with Deloitte Tax, Leon had a head start in her study of tax law before attending the Law School.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to do tax, because I did tax before coming to law school and I wanted to try something new,” she said. “But I took ‘Federal Income Tax’ my first year and really got into it again. The tax faculty are great here, so I kind of lucked out.”

After graduation, Leon will work for Caplin & Drysdale, a renowned law firm in Washington, D.C. She holds a bachelor of business administration degree in accountancy and political science from the University of Notre Dame.

Young children who display disruptive behavior reduce those behaviors when their teacher spends extra time playing individually with them, according to a new University of Virginia study published in December in the journal Child Development.

Children who display early disruptive behaviors such as being impulsive, oppositional and/or aggressive are at risk for short- and long-term negative outcomes – even being expelled from preschool. According to the study’s lead author, Amanda Williford, a research associate professor at UVA’s Curry School of Education, research has shown that if these children can form a strong, positive relationship with their teachers, they tend to show better social-emotional and behavioral skills over time. The reality, however, is that children who are disruptive are much more likely to have conflictual teacher-child interactions. 

Williford and her team, which also includes UVA colleagues Jennifer LoCasale-Crouch, Jessica Vick Whittaker  and Jamie DeCoster, found that preschool teachers who spent extra time playing individually with young children who exhibit disruptive behavior had fewer behavior problems across the school year as reported by parents and teachers.

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“This study shows that building a strong and supportive connection with a young child, where teachers get to know and accept the child for who they are, is important for children’s early success in school, especially for children who sometimes act out in the classroom,” Williford said.

The researchers tested two methods of individual play focused on improving teacher-child interactions, “Banking Time” and “Child Time.”

Banking Time encourages teachers to let children lead the play, and to use specific techniques such as observing and commenting on children’s behaviors and feelings. In addition, teachers were asked to refrain from praising specific behaviors, asking questions and teaching skills.

Child Time focuses on increasing the time teachers spent with an individual child, but gave no direction as to how that time was spent. For example, teachers in Child Time could choose to play with children (similar to Banking Time) or teach children early academic skills.

During the study, which included 183 teachers and 470 children ages 3 to 5, teachers played with three children displaying disruptive behavior (one at a time) during the year. Teachers played with one child on a regular schedule (10 to 15 minutes per session, two to three times a week) for seven weeks, and then played individually with the second and the third children.

In Banking Time, children and teachers engaged in art projects, pretend play with figurines or other open-ended activities. Banking Time teachers were careful to let the child decide what to do and to be in charge of the play. They sat back and carefully observed how the children played, commented on what they were doing, and conveyed to children that they were “there for them” by saying things like “I’m here if you need me” or “I’ll always be here to help you.”

Child Time teachers were given no directives on how to spend the time and were much more likely to spend time engaging with children in early literacy or math activites, or playing games of the teachers’ choosing.

The study found that increasing the individual time teachers spend with children who display disruptive behavior – whether through Banking Time or Child Time – improved children’s behavior compared to children in the control condition, who were not asked to spend individual time with teachers. Preschoolers whose teachers used better classroom management practices at the beginning of the year experienced the most significant reduction in disruptive behavior.

Teachers who played with children using Banking Time displayed lower negativity toward the disruptive children, compared to teachers who were assigned to Child Time or the control condition.  

“When teachers spend individual time with a child, this alone seems to improve children’s behavior, according to parents and teachers. The message here is that simply spending time with a child may help them to be more successful in the classroom,” ” Williford said.

Ironically, Banking Time teachers also displayed fewer positive interactions with children.

“Interestingly, teachers using Banking Time are discouraged from engaging in some teacher-directive behaviors that are most often perceived as positive,” Williford said. “For example, they intentionally refrain from asking questions, using praise, or teaching a skill.” 

The early childhood classroom is a place where children can learn essential school readiness skills. Preschoolers who display disruptive behavior often miss critical early learning opportunities. This study provides support that interventions focused on increasing positive teacher-child interactions can have impacts on adults’ perceptions of children’s disruptive behavior and the quality of teacher-child interactions. 

Daphna Bassok, a professor in the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, was recently selected as one of 102 recipients of the Obama administration’s Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers – the highest honor bestowed by the United States government upon science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

“I am just extremely honored to receive this award from President Obama, whose commitment to scientific rigor and evidence-based social policy has been so inspiring to me,” Bassok said. “It is exciting to have work that is focused on early childhood quality improvement be recognized alongside the work of such an incredibly impressive group of scientists.”

A former elementary school teacher, Bassok has spent her career in academia researching the impact that high-quality early childhood experiences can have on children. She is currently leading a partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education that seeks to overhaul its early childhood education system, in part by making high-quality opportunities become more accessible.

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“The goal there is to use accountability systems to improve the quality of teacher-child interactions, and to make sure parents know which programs are the highest quality,” Bassok said.

UVA Today recently caught up with Bassok to talk more about her research and her prestigious honor.

Q. What led you to pursue a career dedicated to early childhood research? 

A. My interest in early childhood education stems from my own work as a kindergarten-through-second-grade teacher. As a novice teacher, I was blown away by the differences I observed between the kindergarteners in my class who had gone to preschool and those who hadn’t. I found myself thinking about this often and wondering to what extent access to high-quality, early childhood experiences could help narrow achievement gaps between low- and high-income children. 

Q. What evidence can you point to that suggests early childhood experiences can have long-term impacts? 

A. Over the past three decades a large body of evidence from education, developmental psychology, neuroscience and economics has demonstrated that early childhood is a particularly malleable time in the life course and that interventions targeted toward this period can have long-lasting and cost-effective impacts. 

We have particularly compelling evidence from randomized experiments, which show that low-income children randomly assigned to receive an intensive and high-quality early childhood experience do substantially better on a whole host of adult outcomes. 

Today, the question is no longer, “Can early childhood experiences make a long-term impact?” We know they can.  What we need to know now is, “How can we ensure that all children have access to the kind of high-quality, early childhood experience that are necessary to ensure long-term benefits?”

Q. Who can benefit from learning how to ensure high-quality, early childhood experiences? 

A. Too many parents in the United States cannot find or afford early childhood programs for their young children that both support their children’s development and simultaneously meet the family’s needs for reliable child care. It’s a costly missed opportunity because affordable, high-quality, early childhood opportunities can be game-changing, not only for the children themselves, but for their families and society more broadly. 

Q. Can you tell us more about your work with the Louisiana Department of Education?

A. In 2014, I received a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences for a project called “Building effective state-wide quality rating strategies for early childhood system reform.” We are working in partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education as they overhaul their early childhood system. Their overarching goal is to ensure all children from birth to age 5 have access to high-quality, early learning opportunities, and they’ve been pretty innovative in trying to get there. 

There are two major arms to our work. One has to do with how Louisiana defines and measures “high-quality.” Unlike lots of other states – which focus on “structural” features of early childhood, like class sizes or teacher child ratios – Louisiana is moving toward a system that is much more focused on measuring the true quality of teacher-child interactions. They have built a system through which every publicly funded, early childhood classroom in the state gets observed multiple times a year. 

Our team at UVA is helping Louisiana find the best ways to measure, incentivize and support high-quality learning environments for young children.

The other arm of the work is about helping low-income parents make informed decisions about where to send their young children to school. Right now, parents have a really difficult time finding an affordable program, and an even tougher time finding one that is high-quality. In our partnership with Louisiana, we are working on ways to make it easier for parents to identify the programs that are best for their kids.

Q. What is the ultimate goal of this project?

A. The ultimate goal is to understand how we can provide high-quality, early childhood opportunities at scale. Our work is about bringing years of rigorous research on child development and effective early childhood interventions into the messy, complex reality of state systems where there are so many constraints and moving pieces.

Working with Louisiana has been an incredible opportunity because they have been so collaborative and committed to using data and evidence to shape their policy decisions.  I hope the lessons we learn from this collaboration will help in other contexts nationwide.

Looking back on their college careers, former students likely will not remember the exact title of every term paper they wrote or the contents of every reading. Many, however, can vividly recall the advice and the professors that shaped those four critical years.

For fourth-year University of Virginia student Aubree Surrency, that professor is LaVae Hoffman, an associate professor of speech language pathology in the Curry School of Education. Hoffman became Surrency’s mentor at a particularly vulnerable time during the student’s second year, when she was deciding to switch from a pre-med track to UVA’s speech pathology program.

“That was a very crucial time because I realized that I had to pick one and I was trying to decide which one would be best for me and my life,” said Surrency, sitting in Hoffman’s office last semester.

Two years after Hoffman and Surrency were paired through the Office of African-American Affairs Faculty-Student Mentoring Program, they continue to meet regularly. Surrency, who hopes to work in a children’s hospital eventually, has worked in Hoffman’s lab for a year and half, managing online outreach for the professor’s research on child language disorders. A major part of her role is reaching out to parents participating in online surveys.

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“When you get those responses, you feel like you are doing something really beneficial,” Surrency said. “I had never done any lab work before this, and I think it is really interesting.”

Hoffman is also assisting Surrency as she applies to speech pathology master’s degree programs.

“I would like to stay in Virginia, but I am also considering returning to New York,” said Surrency, who grew up in Long Island. “After seeing how parents are advocating for their kids through Professor Hoffman’s research, I would really like to work with kids in a hospital setting and eventually, in schools.”

She and Hoffman have been discussing factors to consider when choosing a graduate school program, and strategies for writing personal statements or preparing for the GRE.

“Once you have been through the process of getting advanced degrees and getting your clinical practice set up, you tend to forget that there was a time in your life when you did not know how to do those things,” Hoffman said. “Mentoring lets you help someone who is in that position, and it is so delightful and easy to do.”

The Office of African-American Affairs mentoring program was established more than 20 years ago and is just one of many examples of formal and informal mentoring on Grounds. Many students continue to check in with a favorite professor, take multiple classes with them and ask for advice during office hours. Older students are paired with an adviser in their major, while first- and second-year students are assigned school-specific advisers and can enroll in one-credit College Advising Seminars. 

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Third-year student Cat Wyatt met one of her mentors, associate French professor Janet Horne, during a College Advising Seminar two years ago. Horne’s class, “Going Global (Right Here on Grounds),” combines discussions of international policy with assignments that expose students to the many cultures represented at UVA and the opportunities for global study and research available to them. Wyatt said the class validated her decision to major in international relations and introduced resources she might have missed.

“It opened my eyes to so many different routes I could take on Grounds,” said Wyatt, who continued to meet with Horne after her course concluded. “Professor Horne is definitely one of my mentors now.”

Wyatt returned to Horne’s classroom to meet the latest group of first-year students enrolled in her seminar. Each year, Horne asks some of her former students to come back and speak to her class, telling the new students about experiences they have loved at UVA.

“I try to encourage each of them, in their own individual way, to get out there and discover things on Grounds,” Horne said.

Horne’s class was one of more than 80 one-credit advising seminars offered in the fall. Each paired top faculty members with about 20 first-year students for courses that are 80 percent academic content and 20 percent advising content. The faculty members serve as the designated academic adviser for each student, helping them decide which classes to take, consider different majors and learn more about the resources available at UVA. With this model, students who might otherwise only see their academic adviser once per semester see him or her several times per week.

That level of accessibility helps build strong faculty-student relationships like the mentorship that Wyatt still enjoys, two years after taking Horne’s class.

“I love the COLA class because I get to meet with the students I am advising 14 times per semester. I have gotten to know each one of them and they have gotten to know each other,” Horne said. “I feel like it is a real privilege. That first year, that first-semester experience, can help set the direction of their time at UVA.”

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On the last day of classes in 2016, Horne and her students reflected on their transition from high school to college.

“When we started this class in August, you had just arrived at UVA. Some of you were quietly freaking out, but you were having lots of good experiences,” Horne told the students. “Now, you feel a lot more integrated and you know the ropes. That’s great.”

In their final presentations, students talked about how the class had helped them learn more about the community they had just joined.

One student, who came to UVA from China, mentioned getting involved in the VISAS program, which pairs international students with peers who meet with them each week to work on English language skills.

Several spoke about meeting with groups like the International Rescue Committee, which visited Horne’s class to talk about the refugee community in Charlottesville. Some students attended a public lecture by Khizr Khan, father of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, a UVA alumnus killed in Iraq in 2004. The elder Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention and later visited UVA as a guest of the Miller Center, a nonpartisan group that regularly hosts marquee political speakers.

Other students recalled attending festivals, dinners and other events held by cultural groups on Grounds.

“Just by taking that one step, I ended up learning so much more about so many global cultures right here on Grounds,” said first-year student Sofia Espinosa, who spoke about dancing at a Culture Festival put on by UVA’s Organization for Young Filipino Americans. 

Horne reiterated that message as she closed the class.

“Just take those small steps in a way that feels genuine to who you are and then when you have big decisions to make, it will hopefully make those a little easier,” Horne said.

She reminded them that she would be there whenever they needed to talk about those decisions.

“Whenever I see an email from one of you, I will answer it right away. I am always available to talk on the phone or find a time to meet,” she said.

Finally, she reflected on the progress that each of them had made working with her and with each other as they acclimated to UVA.

“It is obvious that they are no longer in the same place that they were when they arrived on Grounds,” she said after the class. “That is what education should be about. This class is a little microcosm of what UVA is about, what liberal arts education can be.”

Researchers from the University of Virginia have found a promising way to pique adolescents’ interest in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics: their parents.

The study, conducted with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago, enlisted parents of 10^th- and 11^th-graders. It found that parents who conveyed the importance of math and science courses to their children in high school made a lasting impact on their interest in STEM fields years down the road.

The findings, published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first to show that a motivational intervention by parents can have important long-term effects on a student’s STEM preparation and career pursuits.

While the U.S. Department of Education reports STEM career opportunities continue to grow rapidly – outpacing the growth of nearly all other occupations combined – not enough U.S. students are adequately prepared to enter these fields. Current research indicates that many students do not enroll in courses that are prerequisites for STEM careers, a problem that starts in high school and persists into college.

The findings from this study are the first to demonstrate that parents can play an important role in reversing this trend.

One of the study’s lead researchers, Chris Hulleman, a research associate professor at UVA’s Curry School of Education, said the findings point toward an underutilized resource. “Frequently, schools want to utilize parents in motivating and supporting students, but they’re not sure what the best approach is,” he said.

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As part of the randomized control trial, parents in the intervention group were sent a brochure and given access to a website that detailed the usefulness of STEM courses like physics, calculus and chemistry – courses that are available as electives in most U.S. high schools, but are rarely part of the required coursework. Hulleman explained that both the brochure and the website gave parents suggestions on how they could talk to their children about the importance of STEM education.

“The materials focused on how to make STEM relatable to a teenager’s daily life,” Hulleman said. “For example, a teenager might be interested to know that both chemistry and physics are involved in building the cell phones they use daily.”

Once the brochures and website information were sent out, the research team confirmed that more than two-thirds of parents shared the information with their children in some manner, and that more than 90 percent of parents accessed the website.

Hulleman noted that researchers know little about the types of conversation parents had with their children as a result of reviewing the resources. “We had no contact and provided no training, other than the brochures and website, to help parents talk to their kids about the importance of STEM courses in a specific way,” he said. “We simply sent the information in hopes that it would spark a conversation between parents and their children.”

Despite this unknown, the research team found impressive results. Hulleman said the team’s initial goal was to see if the intervention would simply increase student participation in high school STEM courses. “An initial study confirmed that students whose parents were part of the intervention increased their enrollment in STEM courses by nearly one semester’s worth on average,” Hulleman added.

The research team then followed up with the same group of students five years later, and found a long-term positive effect on STEM achievement and perceptions. The students who participated in more STEM courses during high school after their parents viewed the brochure and website ended up performing better on the math and science portions of the ACT, a college preparatory exam typically taken during a student’s junior or senior year.

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Furthermore, once these same students entered college, they took more STEM courses than the students whose parents had not received promotional materials during the initial study. They were also more likely to have STEM career aspirations and were more likely to perceive STEM fields as useful and valuable.

The findings are a step in the right direction, according to Hulleman, who said the benefits of exposure to STEM courses in high school go beyond producing qualified job applicants.

“What will make us great as a nation is if we have curious students who want to learn and solve today’s problems,” he said. “If we have students like that, then we will be able to better tackle and solve issues like global warming or reducing energy consumption.”

Hulleman added the current intervention has great potential because it is simple and low-cost.

“What we’re asking parents to do isn’t time-intensive or complex, but it may be potentially different than what they’re currently doing. We’re providing a resource that may reframe for parents how math and science can feel relevant for their children,” he said.

While the results are exciting, Hulleman cautioned that more work needs to be done to determine if the approach would work in different communities across the country. The current study was conducted in an upper-middle class setting with mostly college-educated parents. Researchers are uncertain whether a similar approach might work in a communities where fewer parents are college-educated or do not perceive STEM careers as valuable.

University of Virginia researchers have found that students learn more from teachers whom the researchers characterize as “warm demanders” – teachers who expect a lot of their students academically, lead a very well-organized classroom and make students feel supported in their efforts.

And for African-American students, perceiving such high academic expectations was especially significant.

The study, published in the latest issue of Child Development, used data from 634 U.S. teachers who participated in the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, a large-scale observational study of classroom teaching. Amongst the data collected were a series of surveys that asked fourth- and fifth-grade students to rate statements like “My teacher in this class makes me feel that he or she really cares about me,” “In this class, my teacher accepts nothing less than our full effort” and “Everybody knows what they should be doing and learning in this class.”

Lia Sandilos, a Virginia Education Science Training postdoctoral research fellow in UVA’s Curry School of Education and lead researcher of the study, said the findings add to a growing understanding of what promotes academic growth in a diverse classroom setting.

“Initially, we found that a teacher’s perceived warmth alone was related to students’ academic growth,” she said, “but when we examined teachers’ perceived warmth in combination with demand characteristics, such as whether students viewed their teacher as being well-organized or having high expectations of them, it turned out that demand played a much bigger role in predicting academic growth.”

That sense of academic challenge was especially important in classrooms with greater numbers of African-American students, she added.

Another key finding from the study is that African-American students showed academic growth when they perceived high expectations, regardless of the race of the teacher.  Until now, the positive impact of teachers characterized as warm-demanders for African-American students had been supported mainly by small qualitative studies, set in classrooms where the teacher and majority of students were both African-American.

Curry School professors Sara Rimm-Kaufman and Julia Cohen, co-investigators of the study, believe the findings are extremely relevant at a time when classrooms across the United States are increasingly diverse and complex. Although decades of research have linked setting high academic expectations to positive learning outcomes, Rimm-Kaufman said this study was one of the first large-scale studies to use data from the students’ point of view.

“It reminds us that students read and absorb teachers’ language, signals and gestures about expectations for academic work, even when teachers aren’t aware of it,” she said.

The study sheds light on the fact that best teaching practices may not look the same in every classroom, according to Cohen, an affiliate faculty member in Curry’s Center on Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness, known as EdPolicyWorks. “The literature tends to treat good teaching practices as universal, but this study shows that certain teaching practices may be especially beneficial in particular classroom contexts,” she said.

The findings in this study point to a clear take-away message, according to the research team.

“It’s important for teachers to be aware that the direct or indirect messages they send to students, particularly students of color, can influence how they perform in the classroom,” Sandilos said.

Rimm-Kaufman added that the right message could make a big difference for students who are on the cusp of adolescence. “By fourth and fifth grade, many African-American students are becoming more aware than white students of stereotypes that convey low expectations for performance,” she explained.

The findings from this study show that asking these students to rise to the challenge and perform at their best in the classroom could make a big difference to combat these stereotypes, Sandilos said.

“What we see is that receiving clear, positive messages about their abilities and their potential for achievement can really go a long way in fostering academic success,” she said.

Sandilos also acknowledged that more work needs to be done in understanding the value of teachers who are characterized as warm-demanders. “In this study, we just looked at how these different characteristics influenced academic outcomes,” she said, “but it’s also important to understand how they play a role in cultivating other aspects of a student’s development, such as social skills or self-control. It’s possible that warmth and caring would play a greater role in this regard.”

For now, Sandilos and her team hope their findings encourage schools to engage in professional development that highlights the value of challenging students to help them realize their full academic potential.

Today’s announcement of U.S. News & World Report’s annual graduate school rankings was met with celebration at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. The school cracked the top 20 nationally – tying for 18^th place (and No. 10 among public schools) – representing a significant advance over the past decade, from No. 31 overall in 2007.

“This rise is due directly to the steadfast and focused efforts of our faculty and staff and the talent they bring to bear on their work,” Curry Dean Robert C. Pianta said. “Not only have we grown and innovated in academic programs, but throughout this period we have dedicated our efforts to securing sponsored support for our research. Our faculty’s success in obtaining highly competitive federal grants has led to a steadily growing portfolio of funded projects. This is truly extraordinary, accomplished over a period of considerable uncertainty in federal grant programs. 

“I am extremely proud of our faculty’s accomplishments and this recognition of our collective success.”

Curry also saw five of its programs ranked in the top 10 nationally: special education at No. 4, elementary education (No. 6), secondary education (No. 9), administration and supervision (No. 10) and education policy (tied for No. 10).

Curry’s rankings highlighted another strong showing by UVA’s graduate programs. Those ranked in the top 40 included:

• School of Law: No. 8 overall;
• Darden School of Business: No. 14 overall, No. 8 for management;
• School of Nursing: No. 19 for master’s programs, tied for No. 15 for Doctor of Nursing Practice, No. 2 for Clinical Nurse Leader and No. 7 for psychiatric and mental health across the lifespan;
• School of Medicine: No. 24 for primary care and No. 27 for research; and
• School of Engineering and Applied Science: No. 39 overall.

U.S. News also updated its rankings of several social science and humanities doctoral programs in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences – last ranked in 2013 – with six landing in the top 40:

• English: tied for No. 6 overall, and tied for No. 5 in American literature before 1865;
• Psychology: No. 17 overall;
• Corcoran Department of History: tied for No. 18 overall, and tied for No. 1 in U.S. colonial history;
• Economics: tied for No. 29 overall;
• Sociology: tied for No. 32 overall; and
• Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics: tied for No. 37 overall.

Each school’s overall rankings are based upon a mix of statistical measures and reputational surveys, while rankings of individual programs in specialty areas come solely from reputational surveys, as do the social sciences and humanities rankings, according to U.S. News.

The complete rankings can be viewed through the U.S. News website.

University of Virginia faculty members and students have taken on the complex subject of black girlhood in several ways – on the academic front, through an emerging interdisciplinary field focusing on black girlhood; and in positive community engagement. Their aim is to understand what holds girls of color back while developing and supporting programs that help them thrive.

For researchers such as assistant professor Corinne Field and others, it has become clear that broad efforts to help all girls, or all African-American youth, are not specifically empowering black girls. Their work is urgent and the potential benefits to society are great.

“More black girls are thriving artistically, culturally and in many other ways, but research shows they historically have been subjected to racial and gender biases that stand in the way of greater successes,” Field said. “Our goal is to conduct research about the experiences of black girls in ways that will elevate the conversation and yield greater opportunities.”

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UVA is among more than 50 institutions participating in the Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research, a national coalition committed to taking meaningful action to support and improve research addressing the lives of women and girls of color.

“This is a multi-year effort with deep UVA roots,” Field said. A member of the College of Arts & Sciences’ newly designated Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Field is the co-founder of the History of Black Girlhood Network, an informal collaboration among scholars working to promote research into the historical experience of black girls from the 16th century to the present in Africa, the Americas and Europe.

With 2003 UVA alumna LaKisha Simmons, an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, Field organized the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference, coming up Friday and Saturday in the auditorium of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, which will bring UVA faculty and students together with other scholars and artists.

“The Global History of Black Girlhood Conference is just one way for UVA to express its commitment to the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research, and to the collaborative’s goals,” Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Archie Holmes said. “UVA supports research addressing the lives and experiences of women and girls of color because we know that making this research available, present and visible changes the academic landscape.

“When academe commits to talking more about women and girls of color,” Holmes said, “we encourage them to join us, to learn with us and contribute to the body of knowledge. We want girls of color to come to Grounds to be our students, and these women to build a successful academic career here. Their full and equal participation is essential in our society.”  

Students from a range of ages are playing major roles in exploring history and current issues in the conference and other UVA projects.

A Vision of Empowered Black Girls

Abigail Akosua Kayser, a doctoral student in curriculum and instruction in UVA’s Curry School of Education and a former teacher, said she sees much potential in the black girls and teens she is working with this school year. As part of the conference, they’ll be showing on Friday a slice of their lives and featuring their local role models in a short documentary Kayser oversaw, “Black Girlhood: Access and Assets.”

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After growing up in Accra, Ghana, Kayser came to Northern Virginia when she was 16. She found more educational opportunities in the U.S. than what had been previously available to her, and attended UVA, majoring in psychology and graduating from the B.A./M.T. program in 2008.

Her interest in teaching grew from volunteering with a Madison House program, Cavs in the Classroom, as an undergraduate, she said. She taught in Charlottesville and Albemarle County schools for six years before returning to Curry to pursue a Ph.D.

“From the moment she began our program, she expressed a desire to address the needs of historically underserved students in her teaching, research and service,” said her adviser, Stanley Trent, an associate professor of education. “Her work with the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference is yet but one example of what she is doing to reach this goal. She is a positive role model for these young women, some of whom she taught in third grade. I look forward to seeing the incredible work she will do once she leaves us.”

Kayser joined forces with Annalee Jackson, a third-year undergraduate student majoring in youth and social innovations and studio arts printmaking, to win a “Double ’Hoo” research grant last year to examine mentoring programs and what adolescent girls of color say they need to help them grow to become contributing members of the Charlottesville community.

Kayser wanted to create a program that would feel empowering, build confidence and give them a more positive mindset about succeeding in school and in life. A national conference, “Know Her Truths: Advancing Justice for Women and Girls of Color,” held last spring at Wake Forest University, inspired Kayser to put video cameras in the hands of a group of black girls from Charlottesville, a few of them former students she has known since they were in her third-grade class. Through UVA’s Arts Mentors program, which recently joined the Madison House student volunteer center, she became the program adviser and began working with the group, “Sisters of Nia.” The group is part of the City of Promise program, a collaborative effort of public agencies, nonprofits, public schools and neighborhood residents to build a cradle-to-college-and-career pathway for Charlottesville children.

Before they interviewed each other on camera, the girls, who range from sixth to 12^th grade, chose several local African-American women they consider role models and wanted to interview, including UVA history professor Claudrena Harold and Leah Wilson Puryear, director of Upward Bound at UVA. Light House Studio and its managing director, Zoe Cohen, provided technical guidance and production.

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“For many years we’ve collaborated with City of Promise to teach their student population filmmaking workshops,” Cohen said. “Through our workshops, students learn many soft skills – for example, communication, collaboration and time management – in addition to the technical skills – operating a camera, interviewing, recording audio, lighting.”

“Our film project has taught me a lot about some of the advantages and distinct differences that we have as black girls that help us to lead the way and set the bar high,” Charlottesville High School sophomore Zyahna Bryant said. “I have reflected a lot on society’s standards and expectations for me. I have decided that I define myself and I make the rules.”

Kayser intends to continue mentoring girls and to seek other enriching experiences for them. She’s also continuing her doctoral research on “how teachers can support the social and academic outcomes of culturally, linguistically and economically diverse students,” she said.

With that in mind, and under the guidance of adviser Stanley Trent, Kayser and Jackson, along with undergraduates Madelaine Martin, Abigail Jordan and Eleanor Sechler, are working on a related project, funded by a UVA Jefferson Public Citizens research grant, to study culturally and linguistically responsive teaching in Albemarle County Public Schools.

Students Focus on Black Girlhood in the Past

Field taught an advanced undergraduate seminar on the “Global History of Black Girlhood” last fall, which included students participating in archival research. Because the topic is relatively new in the discipline of history, she said their work was “groundbreaking.”

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“Finding archival sources by and about black girls is difficult, even for professional historians, because most collections are organized around the concerns of white adults,” said Field, the author of “The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America.”

The students, working with library curators Molly Schwartzburg, Holly Robertson and Erin Pappas, rose to the challenge. After they identified and researched the significance of primary materials in Special Collections related to the global history of black girlhood, they focused their exhibit around the core themes of identity, resistance and voice, Field said, and wrote essays about the sources, which included personal letters, newspaper articles and photos from the library’s Jackson Davis Collection of African-American Educational Photographs. The resulting exhibit, “Silences and Sounds of Black Girlhood,” is on display in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library’s first-floor gallery through March 24 (and can be viewed online here).

The exhibit covers 15 topics, ranging from the development of education for black children to unequal treatment in rape cases and more. There’s even a piece on the retelling of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” with Alice being black – Maia Wojciechowska’s 1972 children’s book, “Through the Broken Mirror with Alice.”

“The exhibit was so important to me because it was the first exhibit on the global history of black girlhood,” said Gates Millennium Scholar Diana Wilson, a third-year student from Newark, New Jersey, majoring in sociology and women, gender and sexuality.

“Through this exhibit we combatted the lack of accurate perceptions of black women, scholarship on black women and the consistent degradation of black women,” Wilson said. 

Bridging Past and Present in the Academy

UVA undergraduate students are playing a significant role in this week’s conference, organizing a Saturday panel discussion, inviting peers from other universities to submit papers and reviewing their work.

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Wilson, one of the organizers, said in an email she loved the class she took with Field and wanted to help with this conference, to see that it “truly represents and illuminates black girlhood in all its many facets. Most importantly, I wanted to be a part of all this #BlackGirlMagic.”

Field sought different ways to include the participation of black girls and young women in the conference to link the recovery of history with attention on today’s issues.

“We believe the time is ripe for an interdisciplinary and inter-generational conversation focused on the historical experience of black girls,” Field and Simmons wrote about the conference. “In the past few years, new work has emerged that centers black girls’ stories, lives and perspectives.”

Simmons, who earned a bachelor’s degree from the University in history and women’s studies in 2003, credits her UVA education with opening the door to the scholarship she is doing today, including that for her award-winning book, “Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans.” The book had its roots in a Harrison Undergraduate Research Award that funded a trip to New Orleans for archival research, which resulted in her honors thesis about racial identity in the early 20th-century of the city, she said.

Expanding scholarship on topics such as black girls’ and women’s history and how it contributes to today’s landscapes also offers creative interpretations and opportunities for the future.

“We hope that our scholarship will continue to be inspired by black girls and young women who are contributing to conversations about the meaning and nature of race in today’s world,” Field and Simmons wrote, “just as we hope our academic scholarship might help historicize the intertwined nature of racism and sexism that black girls and young women currently face.”

The National Institute of Justice says two-thirds of released inmates will be rearrested within three years. A new University of Virginia program is aiming to change that.

Two UVA professors, in partnership with Edovo, a Chicago-based education technology firm, are launching a program that will develop, implement and evaluate a tablet-based re-entry module to strengthen inmates’ transitions back into society after they complete their sentences.

Ben Castleman, an assistant professor of education and public policy in the Curry School of Education, and Jennifer Doleac, an assistant professor of public policy and economics in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, are working on the project.

“This high recidivism rate signals our collective failure to help formerly incarcerated individuals build stable lives after prison,” Doleac said. “By leveraging interactive technologies and behavioral insights, we can provide prisoners with more personalized information and supports during this often-challenging transition, and reduce the probability of recidivism.”

Before release, the module will help inmates create a personalized transition plan. Post-release, it will provide ongoing information to inmates to keep them on track.

Castleman and Doleac will pilot the intervention in two county jails, and in subsequent years plan to expand the intervention to additional facilities across the country. The individuals participating in the study will create a personalized transition plan that is customized and adapts to their areas of concern, and after release will be provided with ongoing information to maintain stability and help fulfill their personalized plan.

“We have seen this approach work in other contexts, particularly in postsecondary education, where we’ve leveraged personalized text messaging to help students receive and maintain financial aid,” Castleman said.

Currently, there is little rigorous evidence on how to improve re-entry outcomes for incarcerated individuals.

The program is supported by nearly $600,000 in funding from the Charles Koch Foundation and J-PAL North America, a lab based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that aims to reduce poverty through various policy initiatives.

New Nudge⁴ Solutions Lab

Criminal justice recidivism is one of four initiatives coming out of a new lab at UVA. The Nudge⁴ Solutions Lab’s other priorities are to remedy educational inequality and chronic unemployment and to improve veterans’ education on a national scale.

“With partners ranging from school districts and higher education systems to criminal justice facilities, state workforce commissions and the United States Army, we are able to combine the expertise and insights our partners have in the field with the design and analytic experience our team brings,” lab director Castleman said. “Enhancing these robust partnerships with an understanding of how people navigate complex decisions, the latest interactive technologies, creative design and robust analytic approaches, we believe we can move the needle on some of today’s most significant challenges.”

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In 2016, Castleman joined forces with then-First Lady Michelle Obama’s office to utilize a text message-based intervention to provide young Americans with information and reminders about applying to colleges, navigating the financial aid process and dealing with loan repayment. Combined with parallel projects led by The Common Application and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Castleman and colleagues reached more than 1 million students with timely information about college and financial aid decisions and resources.

“Within five years, we were able to test and show the success of a relatively inexpensive solution that significantly impacted students’ success in college, and then scale this strategy to reach more than a million students across the country,” Castleman said.

This week, a new study from his lab, “Nudging at a National Scale,” revealed that providing students with concrete planning prompts to complete the Free Application for Student Aid can increase college enrollment at a national scale by as much as two percentage points. Researchers at UVA, Harvard University, University of Pittsburgh, and West Point assessed the impact of a national financial aid nudge campaign that reached 450,000 high school seniors through the Common Application. 

“Even with various efforts to increase FAFSA completion rates over the last several years, hundreds of thousands of students nationwide who would be eligible for financial aid do not apply for it,” Castleman said. “Our study shows that nudges on how and when to complete FAFSA can generate positive increases in enrollment at a national scale.”

Two distinguished faculty members will give the addresses during the University of Virginia’s 188^th Final Exercises, set for May 20 and 21, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate will speak to the graduates during Valedictory Exercises.

On Friday, May 19, Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, will talk to members of the Class of 2017 – whose ranks include his son – during Valedictory Exercises. On Saturday, May 20, Deborah E. McDowell, UVA’s Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies and director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, will address the graduates of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. On Sunday, May 21, Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education, will speak to the graduates of the University’s other 10 schools and its Data Science Institute.

All three ceremonies will be held on the University’s Lawn, weather permitting.

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“It is a tremendous honor for UVA to have an international leader of President Santos’ distinction as our speaker for Valedictory Exercises,” UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan said. “This is always a meaningful event for our graduating students and their families, and the opportunity to hear from Nobel Peace Prize-winner President Santos will add stature and significance to an already momentous day. I congratulate the Class of 2017 Trustees on their success in attracting such an excellent speaker.”

Sullivan also praised the Finals speakers.

“In addition to serving as longtime, contributing members of the UVA community, both Deborah and Bob are highly distinguished nationally and globally in their respective fields,” Sullivan said. “Deborah is a renowned and respected writer and scholar in the field of African-American literature. Bob is an expert on early childhood education and teacher quality, and he has led the Curry School of Education to new heights in his decade as dean. Both of them will have valuable insights to share at Final Exercises.”

The University expects to award some 6,600 degrees to roughly 4,000 graduates of its 11 schools in May. Finals Weekend is expected to draw some 35,000 visitors to the University’s Grounds.

May 19 Speaker: Juan Manuel Santos

Santos, a former journalist who was first elected president of Colombia in 2010, is the father of Esteban Santos, who is expected to receive his Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Policy and Leadership from the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

Juan Manuel Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for his efforts to end his country’s protracted war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a Marxist guerrilla organization.

Santos, whose great-uncle had been president of Colombia from 1938 to 1942, was a cadet at the Navy Academy in Cartagena, where he studied economics and business administration. He graduated from the University of Kansas with an undergraduate degree in economics and business administration, and pursued graduate studies at the London School of Economics, Harvard University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

As a journalist, he was a columnist and deputy director of the newspaper “El Tiempo” and was awarded the King of Spain International Journalism Prize and served as president of the Freedom of Expression Commission for the Inter-American Press Association. He published several books, including “The Third Way,” co-written with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; and “Check on Terror,” detailing actions against the FARC rebels while he was National Defense Minister.

He was chief of the Colombian delegation to the International Coffee Organization in London and Colombia’s first foreign trade minister. He also has served as Colombia’s finance minister and national defense minister, where he was in charge of implementing the government’s Democratic Security Policy. Santos created the Good Government Foundation and founded the political party Partido de la U, currently Colombia’s largest political party, in 2005.

He was elected president of the Republic of Colombia in 2010. In seeking a second four-year term, he received more than 9 million votes, the highest total obtained by any candidate in the history of Colombian democracy.

Santos is no stranger to UVA. In 2013, he gave a talk in the Dome Room of the Rotunda on the negotiations with the rebels.

May 20 Speaker: Deborah E. McDowell

McDowell, an internationally recognized scholar of African-American literature, has been a member of the English faculty since 1987 and was named the Alice Griffin Professor in 2000.

She was born, reared and educated in the industrial city of Bessemer, Alabama, whose schools remained segregated for 15 years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision was the law. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Tuskegee University in 1972 and master’s and doctoral degrees from Purdue University in 1974 and 1979, respectively.

She spent eight years as an assistant, then associate professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and was a visiting professor of English at Duke University.

Emerging in the 1980s as a leading figure in the development of African-American women’s literature and feminist critical theory, McDowell founded the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon Press and served as its editor from 1985 to l993, overseeing the republication of 14 novels spanning the late 19^th through the late 20^th centuries. She served as editor for the first Norton Anthology of African American Literature and was co-editor, with Arnold Rampersad, of “Slavery and the Literary Imagination.”

As an author and scholar, McDowell has written widely for both academic and general audiences. Her publications include: “‘The Changing Same’: Studies in Fiction by African-American Women” (1995) and “Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin” (1997), as well as numerous articles, book chapters and scholarly editions, most recently “The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration,” co-edited with Claudrena Harold, a UVA associate professor of history, and Juan Battle, professor of sociology at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center. The collection of essays grew out of a UVA symposium she organized in 2009.

Since 2008, McDowell has directed UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, shepherding its undergraduate major and its world-renowned fellowship program and serving as editor of the Carter G. Woodson Imprint sponsored by the University of Virginia Press.

She has been the recipient of various grants, including the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College, the National Research Council Fellowship of the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship. She was elected to UVA’s Raven Society in 1998 and received an honorary degree from her alma mater, Purdue University, in 2006.

May 21 Speaker: Robert C. Pianta

Pianta became dean of the Curry School of Education in 2007. He is the Novartis U.S. Foundation Professor of Education, professor of psychology and the founding director of UVA’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning.

Pianta’s research and policy interests focus on the intersection of education and human development. In particular, his work has been influential in advancing the conceptualization of teacher-student interactions and relationships and documenting their contributions to students’ learning and development. He has written or co-written more than 300 articles, 50 chapters and 10 books, and has led research and training grants totaling more than $60 million. He is past editor of the Journal of School Psychology and associate editor for American Educational Research Association Open. Among several scholarly service roles, Pianta was a member of the Head Start National Research Advisory Board, the advisory board for the William T. Grant Young Scholars Program, and the National Research Council Committee on Early Childhood Mathematics.

Pianta has led research and development on measurement and improvement tools that help teachers interact with students more effectively and that are used widely in the United States and around the world. His work has influenced the development and improvement of early education programs in Colombia, Ecuador, Australia, Chile and Turkey.

He received Bachelor of Science and a Master of Arts degrees in special education from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Minnesota. He began his career as a special education teacher and joined the UVA faculty in 1986.

An internationally recognized expert in both early childhood education and K-12 teaching and learning, Pianta regularly consults with federal agencies, foundations, universities and governments. Pianta received the Senior Scientist Award from Division 16 of the American Psychological Association in 2014 and the Review of Research Award from the American Education Research Association in 2002. He was named a fellow of the American Education Research Association and received Distinguished Alumnus Awards from the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education in 2014 and from the University of Minnesota in 2016.

Researchers continue to gather evidence that exercise can serve as a supplement to, or even a replacement for, drugs in their efforts to combat specific illnesses. With $3.6 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, researchers at the University of Virginia are seeking to identify the specific dose of exercise that will complement one of the most frequently prescribed drugs aimed at improving a person’s level of blood glucose (sugar) and vascular health.

According to the American Heart Association, more than 33 percent of American adults have been diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that dramatically increases a person’s risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and other health problems. Risk factors include elevated waist circumference (sign of abdominal obesity) and unhealthy measures of blood pressure, circulating glucose and cholesterol.

“We currently know that exercise alone or a commonly prescribed anti-diabetes drug, Metformin, are successful at reducing cardiovascular disease risk factors,” said the study’s principal investigator, Steven Malin, an assistant professor in the Curry School of Education’s kinesiology department. “One might assume then that pairing exercise with Metformin would provide greater impact on health. This doesn’t appear to be the case, though. In some cases, one plus one just doesn’t equal two.”

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In earlier work,  Malin and colleagues found that exercise training alone reversed many of the risk factors included in metabolic syndrome. But if a patient in the study took Metformin while training, the effect of exercise on reversing risk factors was lost. It is not really clear how exercise and Metformin interact to blunt or promote health outcomes, but Malin and colleagues are hypothesizing that the “dose” (or intensity) of the exercise can have different effects on health when taken with the drug.

“We have preliminary results that show Metformin blunts the effects of higher intensities of jogging or cycling on fitness, blood pressure, inflammation and insulin sensitivity,” Malin said.

With the new NIH funding, the research team aims to determine a specific dose of exercise that best complements the frequently prescribed drug.

Over the next five years, the team will recruit 80 individuals who meet metabolic syndrome criteria based on national guidelines. Each individual will follow a 16-week exercise program that will vary in intensity, and also will be provided either Metformin or a placebo. Participants will receive measures of their metabolism, body fat and muscle mass, fitness, glucose control and vascular health. An exercise specialist will supervise the exercise training sessions and all exercise and drug treatments will be personalized.

Malin is leading a team that includes Curry School professor Art Weltman, and Dr. Eugene Barrett, Dr. Zhenqi Liu and James Patrie of the School of Medicine.

The impacts of the study have the potential to reach even beyond the 33 percent of adults in the United States diagnosed with metabolic syndrome.

“The more we understand about how exercise impacts chronic disease, as well as how exercise interacts with pharmacological drugs, the more accurately we can prescribe exercise at the doses needed to optimize health,” Malin said.

Malin hopes that this study is a step forward in understanding how to maximize care for people at risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“We know that exercise is effective at combating disease,” he said. “But people don’t just exercise. They eat food, take medication and/or dietary supplements, too. These factors alone or collectively may alter the ability of exercise to work.”

In turn, teasing out how these therapies work in combination will lead to answers that foster precision medicine for optimization of health and well-being.

Business First, a Buffalo, New York-based business publication, ranked the University of Virginia fourth among 499 of the nation’s public colleges and universities in its third annual rankings.

“Business First’s formula was designed to identify the public universities and colleges that offer the best educational experiences to their students,” the publication wrote. “The highest scores went to schools with highly selective admissions processes, strong retention and graduation rates, impressive earnings by alumni, generous resources, affordable tuitions and housing costs, diverse faculties and student bodies, and economically robust communities.”

The top five public colleges – the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of California-Berkeley, UVA and the University of California-Los Angeles – each have admission rates below 30.6 percent, retention rates above 96.2 percent and four-year graduation rates better than 73.3 percent, the publication noted.

This year’s Business First rankings encompass the public colleges that grant bachelor’s degrees and supplied a full set of data to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Rounding out the top 10 were the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, the University of Illinois-Champaign, the University of Maryland-College Park and the College of William & Mary.

Jefferson Scholars Foundation Awards Faculty Trio for Excellence in Teaching

Three faculty members were recognized last week for their exceptional commitment to classroom teaching at an awards ceremony at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation.

Cassandra Fraser from the Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts & Sciences; Amanda Kibler from the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education in the Curry School of Education; and Anneke Schroen from the Department of Surgery in the School of Medicine received the foundation’s 2017 Award for Excellence in Teaching.

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Every year the foundation invites department chairs from across the University to nominate a full-time faculty member who has “endeavored selflessly to instill in their students the virtues of scholarship and love of learning.” The selected winners receive $5,000 and are invited to take part in a variety of academic programming that occurs at the foundation every year.

 “This award is an opportunity for the foundation to recognize and showcase faculty who exemplify the three criteria that are the pillars of our mission: scholarship, leadership and citizenship,” Ben Skipper, the foundation’s director of graduate and undergraduate programs, said.

The foundation, which has long provided scholarships for outstanding undergraduate and graduate students, has expanded its efforts to recognize excellence at the University by establishing a series of faculty award programs. In the last 10 years, the foundation has awarded more than $450,000 to approximately 50 faculty members.

­ – Joyce Carmen

UVA’s MFA Programs Make Top-10 List; McIntire Master’s in Tech Also Ranked

College Choice, a college-decision website which frequently issues rankings of various academic programs, listed the University’s Master of Fine Arts programs No. 8 in the nation in a new ranking issued in March. This week, it rated the McIntire School of Commerce’s Master of Science in the Management of Information Technology program No. 20 in the nation.

UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences offers the M.F.A. in both drama and creative writing.

College Choice collated and compared the academic reputation, student satisfaction, affordability and average annual salary of early career artists from M.F.A. programs across the country to create its ranking. Criteria included retention rates, economic accessibility and the averages of early career salaries, as reported by PayScale. 

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The top 10 in the M.F.A. rankings: Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, the University of California-Los Angeles, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Michigan, UVA, Johns Hopkins University and Brown University.

McIntire’s M.S. in MIT program is a one-year, executive-style program “recognized as a leader in developing technology-savvy business decision-makers,” according to College Choice. “The program is designed to help students understand how current and emerging technologies can best be applied to make their organizations more profitable, productive and competitive. The program offers an innovative curriculum that employs a real-world, problem-solving approach and an outstanding faculty dedicated to teaching and bringing the corporate perspective into the classroom.”

The information technology rankings were based on cost, reputation and return on investment, according to the announcement.

Outstanding Workplace Education Partnership Award

The Virginia Association for Adult and Continuing Education recently gave UVA’s Department of Facilities Management its Outstanding Workplace Education Partnership Award, recognizing the University’s GED and English as a Second Language programs. University Human Resources partners with Charlottesville Adult Learning Center to offer the classes.

As a partner and sponsor of this program, UVA’s Center for Leadership Excellence attended the award ceremony. In accepting the award, Diane Ober, who coordinates the program, said, “I believe that for many employees, this is the foundation for believing in themselves, and having the confidence to plan career goals.”

Shannon Rauth will walk the University of Virginia’s famed Lawn during May’s Final Exercises. However, she still has one more year before she can collect her undergraduate degree in sociology from the College of Arts & Sciences and her master’s degree in elementary education from the Curry School of Education.

“We don’t get either diploma until the end of five years, even if you’ve finished your undergraduate degree,” the varsity swimmer said, “but we have the option to walk.”

Rauth still needs one year of student teaching to finish at UVA, so why is she walking now?

“I want to walk with my teammates,” she said on a recent sunny day, sitting on a white bench in one of the pavilion gardens that stem from the Lawn.

That dedication to team began for Rauth at the age of 5, when she started swimming for the Upper Mainline YMCA swim team in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. In March, Rauth retired from competitive swimming. She will come full circle this summer, when she returns to the pool deck in Berwyn to coach the next crop of 5-year-olds, who can only hope to reach the competitive heights that have been a hallmark of her swimming career. Rauth shared some of her story with UVA Today.

Q. What drew you to swimming?

A. It was always something that my family enjoyed doing together. Both my parents swam and that is how they met. When I was little, I wanted to swim on a team and win ribbons. It starts off with that.

I’m a very, very competitive person and that was a really great outlet for me growing up, to be competitive and not let it bleed too much into every other part of my life. I really enjoy racing and being in high competition. As I got older, I couldn’t imagine my life without it. I was very lucky to be part of some amazing teams that were like second families. It started off as a love for the water, but it kind of grew more into what the sport does for you as a person.

Q. What is your best stroke?

A. I’m a freestyler primarily, but I do butterfly as well. Those are my two strokes. I’m the sprinter, so I do the 50- and 100-meter free and the 100 butterfly.

Q. Do you listen to music to pump up before a race?

A. I actually don’t. I swim way better when I am super calm. If I listen to any music, it’s really calm music. If it’s really hyped up, I get way too tense. So I am normally someone who doesn’t really listen to music at all during meets and has to goof around.

Q. How did you end up at UVA?

A. Thinking about where I wanted to go to college started in my sophomore year. I knew all of my life that I wanted to swim in college, because I just loved it and I knew swimming would open a lot of doors for me as I got better at it.

I sat down with my coach and talked about what I was looking for in a school. I wanted to be somewhere where I wasn’t the best person on the team or the worst person on the team, so I could contribute. That was the most important thing to me.

I knew at that point that swimming was going to be over for me when I was done with college. I was being realistic. I wasn’t going to be making any money as a professional. So I knew swimming was going to be over and I needed to set myself up for success outside of the pool, and academics is a huge part of that. I was looking at schools that were very impressive academically.

So if you put those two things together, that’s UVA. When I came here I was like, “I love this place so much.”

Q. What is your proudest moment on UVA’s team?

A. Making [the] NCAA [Championships] my third year as an individual. I’ve gone every year on relays, but my third year I made it by myself and posted a time that I never thought I could reach. I had been working so hard. I’d had a rough week before that and got my head in the right place. I was determined to just enjoy the experience and smile and take it for what it was. I swam so fast and it was so cool to see all of my teammates on the side of the pool just freak out when I touched the wall. I swam the 100 butterfly in 52.70. I had never broken 53 seconds before that. My best time was 53.1 before that.

My other fondest accomplishment was being elected co-captain; I think that was even better than breaking 53 seconds. It is just such a huge honor to represent the team, and that your teammates want you to be making decisions for them and being the liaison between the teammates and the coaches.

Q. So you’ve retired from swimming. Your last race was a relay that included UVA swimming great Leah Smith. How does it feel to hang up your goggles?

A. We are a winter sport. I was lucky enough to finish at NCAAs, which is the last meet of the season, and I swam in a relay for my last race. It was my dream to finish on a relay. Even better than that, it was an all fourth-year relay. It was an all-freestyle relay and I swam the first leg. I was trying to earn my best time, and I did, by .01 seconds. You know what? I’ll take it.

It gave me good closure to finish on that note with the people I love and have done everything with for the last four years. We sobbed for an hour afterward. It was just really sad having something that is that big a part of your life come to a close.

A University of Virginia fourth-year student will assist refugees in Jordan, thanks to the Middle East and North Africa Regional Fellowship Program.

Lilly Crown of Deltaville, a fourth-year distinguished major in Middle Eastern languages and literatures who anticipates graduating in May, has been named a MENAR Fellow.

“The MENAR Program matches fellows with partner organizations in the region,” Crown said. “The organization that selected me is called the Collateral Repair Project, a grassroots organization providing food assistance and emergency relief to recently resettled Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Amman, Jordan, and I will be serving as the programs and administrative manager.”

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During the past four years at UVA, Crown has studied the Middle East across 10 academic disciplines – anthropology, politics, education, literature, gender studies, sociology, history, religious studies, language and law. 

“I have supplemented this knowledge with classes about policy, education, non-governmental organization management, human rights activism and conflict resolution,” Crown said. “My life’s aspirations are a product of this academic background.”

To these academic accomplishments, she has added the experience of working at the Hopes-Sitti Women’s Center in the Gaza Refugee Camp in Jerash, Jordan, a country she has grown to love.

“My biggest accomplishment during that time was designing and launching Banaat Connect, an online language-exchange program between women in the camp learning English and American university women learning Arabic,” Crown said. “I learned there that I work at my best when seeking to mend the part of the world that is within my reach, working on the ground to form relationships and getting engaged at the project and organizational level.”

She said the MENAR Fellowship will allow her to return to Jordan, giving her valuable experience and information that will help her formulate her future graduate studies and work experience that will align her abilities with current humanitarian issues.

“After working for different types of institutions that are serving similar problems and crises, I plan to return to school to get a Master of Science in international development and humanitarian aid or a Master of Education in international education policy,” she said “I hope to continue working abroad for inter-governmental or non-governmental organizations providing humanitarian relief to at-risk populations.”

Rachel Wahl, an assistant professor in the Program in Social Foundations in the Department of Leadership, Foundations and Policy at UVA’s Curry School of Education, thinks Crown already shows promise as a researcher.

“Lilly has been incredibly motivated from the beginning,” Wahl said. “She designed her own study to understand the relationship between women’s agency and information and communication technology in Jordan. She then secured funding and carried out the study on her own in challenging circumstances. She returned to UVA, analyzed her data and has just finished the first draft of her thesis. She has accomplished more in a semester than many graduate students are able to do.”

While a student at UVA, Crown has been president of the Arabic Conversation Club, vice chair of the Cultural Programming Board and founder of the Charlottesville Alliance for Refugees. She has also been a knitting instructor at Knit for Hope, a group that knits clothing items for refugees living in camps in Northern Europe.

She received the Dee Family Global Scholarship, a Global Internship Grant, the Gilbert J. Sullivan Z-Society Scholarship, an International Residential College Summer Travel and Learn Scholarship and a SALAM Scholarship through the Royal Sultanate of Oman, where she studied for seven weeks.

She has been a volunteer tutor for immigrants and refugees and a teaching assistant in graduate-level English as a Second Language classrooms. She also worked as a research assistant for a Curry School Program in Social Foundations project that looks at the learning that occurs in dialogue, and for a Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics project that looked at violence escalation in the Syrian civil war.

She has interned for “Kerning Cultures” podcasts, helping produce episodes that tell stories about culture, history, science and entrepreneurship in the Middle East. 

“I’m honored and excited to be one of this year’s fellows,” Crown said. “The work I do will be humbling and it will be the perfect start to a career in public service.”

A classroom of wide-eyed fifth-graders huddled around their teacher’s desk to look at a print of John Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence,” a well-known painting that depicts the document’s authors presenting a draft to Congress.

“Tell me what you see in this picture. What is unique or different about it?” the teacher asked.

“Well, everyone’s white,” one student pointed out.

“Yes,” the teacher responded.

And saying nothing else, she moved on.

University of Virginia education experts say moments like this, even if uncomfortable, are often missed learning opportunities. 

The particular school in which this scene unfolded participates in the Double Check program, a professional development program for teachers created to both increase student engagement and reduce disciplinary actions and special education referrals, which disproportionately affect students of color. Led by Catherine Bradshaw, professor of education and assistant dean for research and faculty development at UVA’s Curry School of Education, the goal of the program is to provide school-wide training and individualized coaching to teachers, with the ultimate aim to integrate culturally responsive practices into classrooms.

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Not Applicable?

Double Check coaches use a checklist of instructional elements to guide feedback to teachers on topics such as how a lesson addresses issues of diversity and cultural inclusiveness. Yet when principals observe classrooms like the one in the scene described above, many write “N/A” next to those checklist items.

“Quite often, the principals say they write ‘not applicable’ on their observations because the lesson wasn’t relevant to culture. They think since it didn’t take place during Black History Month or when they were studying Martin Luther King Jr. or the Civil War, that it can’t be culturally relevant,” Bradshaw said. “Our goal is to widen their lens and remind them that inclusiveness as it relates to race, culture and ethnicity is not just a special-occasion topic. It should be infused into all aspects of the curriculum.”

Why Race and Ethnicity Are Meaningful

Racial categories are a social concept – not biological – and they have complex ties to individuals’ day-to-day lived experiences. Many Curry researchers see the examination of these classifications in their research as critical.

“We are pushing researchers to establish more complex methodologies,” said Joanna Lee Williams, an associate professor affiliated with Curry’s Youth-Nex research center, which promotes youth development. “Paying more attention to the myriad ways in which race and ethnicity function for youth development, rather than ignoring these issues or treating them as surface-level categories, can promote healthy development among all youth.”

From her perspective, considering race and ethnicity as variables in research on young adults can result in more effective developmental models. As Williams and Nancy Deutsch, an associate professor in the Curry School, noted in a recent paper, the role of race and ethnicity in research on youth development programs has not received enough attention. This void is particularly troubling, they said, because racial categories, which they say were developed to maintain the power of the dominant group, have historically been correlated to a child’s access to resources, the likelihood that the child will experience institutional discrimination and the way that child defines and experiences positive development. The experts say the processes underlying these correlations often go unexplored, despite their importance for understanding youth development.

Additional approaches will help balance generalizations with the unique experiences students have in everyday scenarios.

“For practitioners, on the other hand, the focus is on how programs are being designed to meet the needs of children,” Williams said, adding that they want to help educators identify how “curricula can honor and respect rich socio-cultural backgrounds and ensure equitable access for all.”

Other Curry researchers – who were studying another question entirely – have found that the consideration of race and ethnicity in empirical research may uncover factors that produce more positive outcomes for students of color.

Jason Downer, associate professor of education and director of Curry’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, and CASTL’s founder and Curry School Dean Robert Pianta observed positive outcomes in cases where students and teachers are of similar racial or ethnic backgrounds. Downer and Pianta believe this observation could lead directly to improvements in the quality of pre-kindergarten education nationwide.

“Preschools are the most diverse places in America and offer us an opportunity to examine some of the factors that may contribute to effective education for a wide range of children in the U.S.,” Pianta concluded.

As Williams pointed out, through its research and expertise, the Curry School “is pushing back on the status quo, challenging dominant norms and assumptions,” and striving to improve outcomes for all students.

Closing the Discipline and Achievement Gaps

When academic researchers study outcomes of students of color in primary and secondary schools, they often refer to two gaps: the discipline gap and the achievement gap. Put more simply, researchers find that, in general, students from racial or ethnic minority backgrounds are disciplined more frequently (the discipline gap) and show lower rates of scholastic achievement than their white counterparts (the achievement gap). Currently, several Curry researchers are designing and testing programs that may reduce or eliminate these gaps altogether.

Teachers’ referrals of students to be disciplined for misconduct contribute substantially to negative trajectories for those students. Students who receive a suspension lose instructional time, fall behind on coursework, become discouraged, and may ultimately drop out. Recent research shows each suspension decreases a student’s odds of graduating from high school by an additional 20 percent. Furthermore, compared to their peers, suspended youth have a higher likelihood of subsequent interactions with the criminal justice system.

A team of CASTL researchers aiming to improve the motivating and engaging quality of instruction also collected data on discipline referrals made by teachers in their study. They worked with teachers using a suite of virtual coaching resources called MyTeachingPartner, or MTP, which was developed at CASTL and has been tested with thousands of teachers in a variety of school settings.

A randomized, controlled trial provided one set of teachers (the “intervention” group) with one or two years of MTP coaching, which included different approaches to instruction and teacher-student relationship-building techniques.

After receiving only a year of coaching, teachers in the intervention group showed no significant disparities in discipline referrals between African-American students and their classmates. Furthermore, the effects of the coaching were sustained and maintained even after the coaching was withdrawn.

Curry researchers are reducing the racial discipline gap where threats of violence are involved through the use of threat assessment teams. “A threat assessment team is a multi-disciplinary team of school staff available to help students involved in a crisis or conflict that includes a threat of violence,” explained Dewey Cornell, professor and director of Curry’s Virginia Youth Violence Project. The team usually includes administrators, counselors, psychologists, social workers, school resource officers and other staff who work toward the goal of helping students solve conflicts or concerns before they escalate into violence.

In comparing white, black and Hispanic students who received threat assessments across Virginia’s public schools during the 2014-15 school year, Cornell’s research team found no racial disparities in disciplinary outcomes, such as suspension, expulsion, school transfer, arrest by law enforcement or incarceration in juvenile detention. One goal of the assessment teams is to respond appropriately to students who are making threats, as opposed to using so-called “zero-tolerance” policies, which typically result in a student’s removal from school.

“Threat assessment gives school authorities a safe, practical and effective way to address threatening behavior by students,” Cornell said.

Curry researchers have considered the achievement gap when studying teacher archetypes – in particular, one referred to as the “warm demander.” Warm demanders nurture and care for their students without lowering academic expectations or standards. The data gathered by observing more than 600 teachers across the United States revealed that teachers’ high expectations, an aspect of demand, were especially important for African-American students’ academic growth. Specifically, lead researcher Lia Sandilos said, teachers who created challenging classrooms with high expectations showed higher achievement gains among their African-American students than teachers who did not. Sandilos cautioned, however, that being warm and caring is a necessary, but not sufficient factor to boost achievement. 

While more work remains, increased disciplinary and achievement equity in the classroom seem to be within reach. To this end, Curry researchers are identifying mechanisms to close the discipline and achievement gaps.

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Taking the issue a step further, UVA education professor Daniel Duke noted in a recent review of studies addressing the achievement gap that focusing only on the gaps across racial categories leaves some potentially important questions unanswered. He argued that analyses should include achievement variation within African-American student groups, rather than only across racial groups.

He raised a number of questions that racial group comparisons have not been able to answer. For example, why do some districts register higher levels of African-American achievement than other districts? Why do some states boast higher levels of black student achievement than other states? Why do black girls tend to do better in school than black boys?

“Addressing these questions can provide insights that hold promise for reducing both within-race and between-race gaps,” Duke said.

The point of framing achievement problems in terms of comparisons within race and ethnicity, he concluded, is to prevent potentially misleading generalizations from being perpetuated.

“When the full range of achievement for racial and ethnic groups is not recognized, the result can reinforce inaccurate stereotypes and encourage overly simplistic explanations for student achievement,” he said.

Not a Color-Blind Society

“For a while there was a mantra about having a ‘color-blind society,’” Bradshaw noted. However, she now believes educators must strive for a better balance in the classroom regarding discussions of race and diversity.

She and her Curry colleagues are trying to drive the conversation beyond a culture-neutral, race-blind approach. “We want to acknowledge differences and highlight strengths. Some are based on culture, some on race, and some are at the intersection of the two,” Bradshaw said. When education researchers consider race and ethnicity in their interventions and data analysis, they are seeing some ways forward to positive results. 

“Curry is very much at the forefront of issues around equity and inclusion,” Bradshaw said. “This is a challenging issue, and we might not have all the answers today. However, particularly given our current political climate, this topic is becoming more important than ever.”

From building a cosmic-ray telescope for student research projects to creating and crafting an online tour experience of Grounds for prospective high school applicants from around the world, the Jefferson Trust, an initiative of the University of Virginia Alumni Association, awarded 19 grants totaling $727,947 to University entities Friday on the steps of the Rotunda.

Established in 2006, the Jefferson Trust is an unrestricted endowment that distributes funds annually through a University-wide grant program. The trust’s mission is to support initiatives that enhance teaching, scholarship and research, allow faculty and students to work closely together while engaging in hands-on learning, and enable the University community to make an impact on other communities locally, nationally and globally.

One such grant is a $20,771 award to help support the student Solar Car Team of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. This project is designed to bring a new dimension to experiential learning at UVA that will not only elevate the intellectual pursuits of the students involved, but also the recognition of UVA engineering on the national scale. Fourth-year mechanical engineering student En De Liow, who leads the all-student team, thanked the trust’s board for its support.

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“The Jefferson Trust has been tremendous in helping us gain enough momentum to revive the Solar Car Team,” Liow said. “On top of offering vital financial support to the team, having a mentor from the board advise the team really guides us toward sustainable growth and our long-term goal of creating a diverse experiential learning platform for students.”

In a project designed to bring together faculty members from different schools and a variety of perspectives to examine how the University approaches disabilities, the trust has awarded a $45,000 grant to the new Disabilities Studies Initiative.

Faculty team leader and English professor Christopher Krentz welcomed the support. “These funds will allow us to hire a part-time graduate student administrator, sponsor more events and spark awareness of disability as a revealing category of analysis, like race and gender, across disciplines, with an aim to establish a rigorous disability studies minor at UVA,” he said.

The School of Law will also receive a grant to support the Digital 1828 Catalogue Collection Project. This $29,419 grant will digitize and curate on a special website Thomas Jefferson’s 1828 collection of law books, representing his vision for a holistic legal education. Under the supervision of Digital Collections Librarian Loren Moulds and James Ambuske, a postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities, student workers will carefully scan and digitize Jefferson’s books, expand interpretive work on the collection and create a virtual bookshelf for perusing the collection, which will be open to the public.

Since its first grants were awarded in 2006, the Jefferson Trust has given $6.3 million to fund 160 initiatives spanning a broad range of schools, departments, student groups and academic centers at the University.

Other 2017 grants include:

Simulations in Teacher Education ($50,000)
This project is a research study that will foster better understanding of the benefits of training simulators for Curry School of Education faculty, teachers-in-training and their future students.

Undergraduate Exploration with Cosmic Rays ($26,650)
This project will build a portable cosmic-ray telescope to be used initially for student research projects at Fermilab near Chicago, and long-term, in the undergraduate physics laboratory at UVA. 

Logistical Pathways to Critical Diversity ($100,000)
This project will address differential outcomes for underrepresented minorities in engineering, leading to the ability to radically transform the student experience at UVA and create a model with broad national applications. 

Diet and Nutrition Intervention Lab ($40,000)
Designed to meet needs for student training and intervention research, especially child nutrition to prevent obesity, the Diet and Nutrition Intervention Lab will offer a resource to teach students applied nutrition.

Inaugural Diversity Funding: “McIntire Allies” and “Diversity Dialogues” ($15,000)
This project will create diversity and inclusion student programs, which will raise awareness of diversity issues, promote understanding of differences and build stronger support networks for underrepresented students in the McIntire School of Commerce.

Teaching Methods Course for Engineering TAs ($89,088)
This project will design a course that will engage undergraduate peer leaders and graduate teaching assistants in understanding both theoretical and practical aspects of teaching, and will influence thousands of undergraduate students each semester through improved instructional practice of 30 to 40 teaching assistants.

Global Leadership Forum 2017 ($50,000)
The funds will support a weeklong event that will convene 50 emerging leaders from 25 countries and an equal number of UVA students to discuss pressing current issues in equal access to quality education for women and girls worldwide.

UVA Landscape Studies Initiative ($83,000)
This initiative uses landscape studies as a transdisciplinary lens to bridge the humanities, biophysical and social sciences, and design disciplines to explore and understand entanglements in the human and non-human world.

Advanced Disease Life Support Program ($57,700)
Advanced Disease Life Support is a novel interdisciplinary program that educates and empowers health care providers with the essential principles to care for persons with advanced, complex illnesses in an inter-professional team setting.

UVA Neurosurgery Teaching and Mentoring Initiative ($6,670)
This project will provide a digital platform that includes personalized clerkship schedules, interactive neuro-anatomy modules, research papers and videos of operating room techniques and procedures to foster early interest in neurosurgery and set an example of UVA leadership within the national academic medical community.

Virtual Tour-University Guide Service ($60,000)
The University Guide Service will craft an online tour so that high school students from all over the world can “see” the Grounds for themselves, hopefully inspiring prospective students to make an in-person visit who may not have otherwise.

Visiting Scholar Program for Underrepresented Minorities in GI ($17,400)
This program is focused on bringing underrepresented minorities to UVA School of Medicine, making them aware of the strengths of the gastroenterology program and the opportunities available at UVA, including rare exposure to liver transplant services. 

The Jefferson Trust Daniel S. Adler Student Grant: College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational ($7,375)
The funds supported the 2017 Flux Slam Poetry Team by enabling them to represent UVA at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. The event attracts 70 colleges from around the world each year.

“Mapping” ($17,800)
“Mapping” is a cross-disciplinary, student-led project marking the achievements in African-American history around the University.

Q* Anthology of Queer Culture ($7,674)
Q* Anthology of Queer Culture is a student-run annual literary magazine and online platform that publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art related to LGBTQ (or “queer”) culture.

Hoots Tutoring ($4,400)
Hoots is a tutoring program whose goal is to shift the focus from department-based tutoring programs to a universally accessible system.

More details on these projects can be found at the Jefferson Trust website.

This summer, pairs of University of Virginia student researchers will examine corrosion in aluminum alloys, probe the social and economic impact of large urban development in the Middle East and develop new therapies for multiple sclerosis.The University has awarded 20 “Double Hoo” research awards, which fund pairs of undergraduate and graduate students who collaborate on research projects. Each project is awarded up to $6,000 toward research expenses, plus $500 to compensate a faculty mentor.

This year’s winners were selected from a pool of 44 pairs of applicants. The research grants were funded through the Cornerstone Plan, which captures many student, faculty and staff aspirations, organized around the theme of leadership.

The funding will allow some students to continue research they have already started; for others, it will be an opportunity to expand what they have been doing or to start something new. Five renewal awards also were presented to winners from last year to help fund the presentation and continuation of their research.

“The Double Hoo Award fosters meaningful interactions between the University’s undergraduate and graduate students,” said Brian Cullaty, director of undergraduate research opportunities at UVA’s Center for Undergraduate Excellence. “The graduate students gain valuable mentoring skills that will serve them well in their future careers, and the undergraduate students benefit from the learning that comes from serious scholarly inquiry.

“The relationships also provide an opportunity for the undergraduate students to learn more about the life of a graduate student and inform their decisions as they consider their own future education,” he added.

Archie Holmes, UVA’s vice provost for educational innovation and interdisciplinary studies, said academic scholarship is one of the more exciting endeavors in which undergraduates can get involved at the University. 

“Our participation in the Gallup-Purdue University survey of college graduates has shown us the importance of having students engage in experiential learning,” Holmes said. “Such participation leads to our graduates finding fulfillment in daily work and interactions, having strong social relationships and access to the resources people need, feeling financially secure, being physically healthy and taking part in a true community.”

Holmes views undergraduate research as an excellent experiential learning activity for students because they learn to collect and assimilate information and knowledge needed to answer questions in their area of interest, think clearly through complex issues and present their findings in a clear manner. “These are important skills that are invaluable in whatever the student chooses to do in their professional and personal life,” he said.

And while undergraduate research generally involves students and a faculty mentor, the Double Hoo grants add another element.

“The Double Hoo program involves graduate students, many of whom will be the faculty of the future,” Holmes said. “In addition to working with undergraduates to define a research project, graduate students gain experience in supervising and mentorship – important skills for them when they enter the job market.”

This year’s Double Hoo winners are:

• Daniel Ajootian of Providence, Rhode Island, a second-year honors politics and English double major, and Jack Furniss of London, a fifth-year history graduate student, who are researching how the United States, Britain and France all moved from emancipation to empire during the 19th century. By examining six prominent individuals who made the journey from advocating anti-slavery to defending imperialism, their project asks why these nations rejected one form of racial subjugation, only to embrace another.

• Caroline Alberti of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a global studies environments and sustainability major with a French minor, and Fatmah Behbehani of Kuwait, a second-year doctoral student in the constructed environment program at the School of Architecture, who are researching massive urban development and new building projects in the Middle East and North African region to see how these projects turn out, who lives in them and what social and economic implications they have on people who live there.

• Pranav Baderdinni of Chantilly, a second-year biomedical engineering major focusing on pharmacology, and Adishesh K. Narahari of Manassas, a third-year M.D./Ph.D. student in the School of Medicine, who are investigating the role of Pannexin (Panx1), a purinergic signaling channel, or membrane receptor pathway, in the initiation and maintenance of neuropathic pain in several different mouse injury models. Neuropathic pain is a chronic pain state that can arise from direct nerve injury, diabetes and chemotherapy.

• Kari Byrnes of Nashville, a third-year cognitive science major, and Stephanie Melchor of Auburn, Alabama, a third-year graduate student in the School of Medicine’s molecular and cellular basis of disease program, who are experimenting with using a parasite infection model to study how inflammation in different parts of the body can lead to chronic muscle wasting, which is a major clinical problem in many cancer patients and patients with other kinds of chronic illness.

• Megan Chappell of Fredericksburg, a first-year biology major, and Anthony Fernandez-Castaneda of Pico Rivera, California, a fourth-year neuroscience graduate student, who will explore novel therapeutics for multiple sclerosis.

• Demitra Chavez of Richmond, a second-year psychology major with a bioethics minor, and Cat Thrasher of Alexandria, a first-year graduate student in developmental psychology, who will research the how mothers regulate their children’s emotions. In a two-part study, they will measure the effect of a mother’s presence on children’s risk-taking behaviors and brain responses in a group of young competitive gymnasts in an effort to determine how variations in early care-giver availability might change a child’s understanding of his or her environment in the long term.

• Lydia Erbaugh of Dayton, a first-year biomedical engineering major with a focus in neuroscience, and Nick Murphy of Apex, North Carolina, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering, who are researching a new bio-responsive, on-demand treatment for those with relapsing multiple sclerosis, immediately eliminating the damage done by a relapse before a patient can receive treatment.

• Raewyn Haines of Vienna, a second-year systems engineering major with a minor in materials science, and Matthew McMahon of Rochelle, Illinois, a second-year doctoral student in materials science, who are developing new analysis methods to investigate factors contributing to the stress corrosion cracking of naval-grade aluminum alloys.

• Kate Haynes of Springfield, a second-year neuroscience major, and Caroline Kelsey of Greenwich, Connecticut, a second-year Ph.D. student in developmental psychology, who are researching the neural underpinnings of pupil mimicry in infants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which measures the rapid delivery of blood to active neural tissue.

• Christina Kim of Fairfax, a second-year biomedical engineering major with a minor in American Sign Language and deaf culture, and Mark Rudolf of Rochester Hills, Michigan, a fourth-year graduate student in the Medical Scientist Training Program, who are researching the regeneration of sensory hair cells of the inner ear, which may aid future efforts to reverse hearing loss.

• Alex Levin of Troy, Michigan, a third-year double major in psychology and American studies, and Diane-Jo Bart-Plange of Kansas City, Missouri, a first-year graduate social psychology student, who will examine whether exposure to news coverage of police shootings of unarmed black victims has an effect on people’s race-related attitudes and behaviors, and what role emotional regulation plays in shaping these attitudes. Their project aims to use psychological research to shed light on the possible consequences of bearing witness to police violence.

• Mikayla Marraccini of Lynchburg, a second-year global public health and biology major, and Anna Way of Kalisz, Poland, a first-year biology graduate student, who will investigate, at the molecular level, how C. elegans, a nematode, allocates nutrients and energetic resources to either its reproductive tissues or to other tissues, with an eye toward better understanding more complex organisms, such as humans.

• Madeleine (Maddi) Mitchell of Richmond, a second-year psychology major, and N. Meltem Yucel of Istanbul, Turkey, a second-year developmental psychology Ph.D. student, who are researching whether emotions shape how people differentiate moral norms from conventional norms by comparing data from 2- to 4-year-olds to data for undergraduate students.

• Ahmed Osman of Fruitland, Maryland, a second-year civil and environmental engineering major, and Mohamad Alipour of Mashad, Iran, a third-year civil engineering doctoral candidate, who are researching innovative methods for assessing the condition of structures and developing camera-based sensors to monitor the health of critical infrastructure, such as bridges.

• Derek Richardson of Virginia Beach, a third-year biology and sociology double major, and Mary-Collier Wilks of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a third-year graduate student in the sociology Ph.D. program, who will research how East Asian international non-governmental organizations work with community activists and other local organizations to achieve their missions in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Richardson will focus on health-related NGOs seeking to ameliorate the HIV/AIDS situation in Cambodia, while Wilks will examine NGO projects in the areas of gender, education and economic development.

• Tsering Say of Annandale, a second-year political and social thought and economics double major, and Andrew Taylor of Houston, a second-year Ph.D. student in religious studies focusing on Buddhism, who are researching how the religious lives of Tibetan nuns and laywomen have changed as traditional Tibetan religious institutions (e.g. nunneries, monasteries) have changed.

• Lynette Sequeira of Richmond, a first-year biomedical engineering major, and Jessica Yuan of North Bethesda, Maryland, a third-year biomedical engineering graduate student, who will seek to develop a computational model to represent the effects of the tumor microenvironment on brain cancer cells.

• Daniel Song of Burke, a second-year chemistry major, and Fang Wang of Wenzhou, China, a second-year graduate student in chemistry, who are researching luminescence properties that can be observed using the naked eye, but analyzed by studying chemical structure alterations and electron density.

• Yifan Wang of Yancheng, China, a second-year political philosophy, policy and law and statistics double major, and Denise Deutschlander of Seattle, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and an Institute of Education Sciences pre-doctoral fellow in the Curry School of Education, who are evaluating a randomized controlled trial that leverages the relationship parents have with college students to encourage low-income, first-generation and Latino students to seek out faculty and staff while in college and thereby increase college completion rates.

• Zeming (Eileen) Zheng of Chantilly, a second-year neuroscience major, and Robyn Sherman of Coto de Caza, California, a second-year biochemistry and molecular genetics graduate student, who are researching a potential cure for Rett syndrome, a childhood neurodevelopmental disorder that primarily affects females.

A new study from the University of Virginia and its partners has found a decrease in bullying and related behaviors. That is coupled with an increase in students’ feelings of safety and belonging at their schools and perceptions that adults help to stop bullying.

The study – conducted with researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia – included self-reported data from more than 246,000 students in grades four through 12 at 109 Maryland schools.

“While bullying is a significant public health concern and has received considerable attention from the media and policymakers, these data suggest that things are starting to improve,” said Catherine Bradshaw, professor and associate dean for research and faculty development in UVA’s Curry School of Education, who began the research while teaching at Johns Hopkins. She is the senior author on the study, published May 1 in the journal Pediatrics.

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“The findings provide insight into bullying behaviors among a large group of students, but are especially valuable as it’s the only study of its kind to report rates of bullying measured over an entire decade,” she said.

Nationwide, approximately 30 percent of school-aged youth have either engaged with, or been victims of, bullying, which led to a significant increase in research on the short- and long-term effects of bullying.

However, unlike this study, few efforts have examined the prevalence of bullying over the course of several years, including data on elementary through high school students. Nor have they focused on multiple forms of bullying that can range from physical and verbal incidents to cyberbullying.

The UVA researchers and their colleagues analyzed collected data that measured 13 indicators of bullying and related behaviors and attitudes, including whether respondents had been a victim of bullying in the past month, if they considered bullying to be a problem at their school and whether they felt safe and felt like they belonged in their school.

Overall, the reported prevalence of bullying and observed bullying decreased over the course of the 10 years of the study, with the greatest improvements in school climate and reductions in bullying occurring in the most recent years.

What Students are Saying

Eighty percent of students reported they felt safe and that they belonged at school, informing ratings of safety that increased significantly over time. Yet up to 28 percent of students in the study still reported that they experienced bullying within the past month. Approximately half of the students had witnessed a bullying incident.

“The findings show promise that there has been a decrease in the rates of bullying during the years of the study, which contradicts the public’s misperception that bullying is on the rise,” Bradshaw said. “That being said, the research shows that too many students are experience bullying on a regular basis, including cyberbullying, due to the increasing use of technology and social media – especially among younger students.

“This study, while encouraging, is a reminder that there is still a lot of work to do to stop bullying behaviors and help all students feel safe at school.”

Since 1966, when a now-famous and often replicated study known as “The Coleman Report” was published, the phrase “achievement gap” has referred to one thing: the differences in academic success between the average black student and the average white student in America.

Daniel Duke, a professor in the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, wants to challenge that framework.

“All African-American students are not low-achievers,” Duke wrote in a recent article, “Can Within-Race Achievement Comparisons Help Narrow Between-Race Achievement Gaps?,” a literature review published in December in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk.

“Always dwelling on average African-American achievement can distract researchers and policymakers from trying to understand why some African-American students are more successful in school than other African-American students,” Duke said in the article. “It seemed to me that the high-performing students had become invisible.”

Duke, who has built a career as an organizational historian studying how educational leaders confront challenging situations, said today’s leaders have a lot to learn from high-achieving minority students.

“Obviously, between-race differences are extremely important,” he said. “But we need an additional set of questions to understand within the given setting – whether it’s a classroom, a school, a state or a region – why there are higher-achieving African-American students. What’s producing these differences?”

Duke’s article examines five different ways to reframe the question of African-American student achievement: variations between schools, differences across school districts, variations between public and charter schools, differences across states, and variations between African-American boys and girls.

“There is a lot of mythology about minority students,” Duke said, referring to John Ogbu’s 2003 book, “Black Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement,” in which Ogbu noted the negativity of African-American peer groups who say that academic achievement is “acting white.”

“We have to be careful of these broad generalizations,” Duke said. “Some of our generalizations are inappropriate. There are also white students who don’t work very hard. Trying to understand individual differences is what we as educators should be all about.”

Two of the more noteworthy findings to come out of Duke’s article include the differences in achievement between African-American students in different states and the differences between African-American boys and girls. Hawaii, for example, had the most African-American students passing AP exams, while Mississippi had the least. Texas graduates 84 percent of its African-American students, while Nevada only graduates 57 percent.

In addition, several studies show African-American girls achieve a higher level of academic success than boys. On the California High School Exit Exam in grade 10, the first-time passing rate for African-American girls in English was 15 percentage points higher than for African-American boys, and four points higher in math. Similar numbers were found in Washington State.

Framing the problem of African-American student achievement with different criteria leads to different questions than when comparing white students to black students. New questions arise. What are the differences in how states fund struggling minority schools? Does state funding of social services and early childhood education make a difference? And would higher levels of achievement be associated with single-gender classes and schools?

Reframing the achievement gap question this way also highlights the successes of students of color.

Joanna Williams, an associate professor at the Curry School, researches the social contexts of race and ethnicity for positive youth development. 

“This reframing of the achievement gap question creates an important opportunity for us to push back against the inaccurate narrative that all students of color are struggling,” she said. “Many youth of color are excelling in schools and are active change agents in their communities.

“It is critical that we identify ways that large numbers of students of color are falling behind. But we have to do that while also amplifying the true story, that many students of color are high-achievers.” 

At the same time, Williams cautioned that high-achievement outcomes are never the result of individual student effort alone and agrees that experts need to continue thinking about how structures in schools create advantages for some and disadvantages for others. 

“Successful student exemplars can help us better understand the dynamics between what individuals bring to the table and how the school environment meets their needs,” she said. 

Duke’s work is doing exactly this, Williams concluded.

In the six years Veronica Katz has been working toward her Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, exciting research findings have resulted from a partnership between Curry and the Washington, D.C. Public School System.

When Katz arrived in 2011, Jim Wyckoff, a professor of education policy and director of UVA’s EdPolicyWorks research center, was beginning research on the IMPACT program, an innovative and somewhat controversial tool for assessing teacher performance and improving teacher quality in the district’s public school system.

Katz quickly became involved in the project and before long was frequently taking the train to Washington to meet with school officials to discuss the IMPACT research, some of which is upending longstanding perceptions of teaching.

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Earlier this year, Katz, Wyckoff and others published research challenging a longstanding perception of teacher turnover. While a growing body of evidence has found that teacher turnover reduces student achievement, Katz and Wyckoff’s research showed teacher turnover under IMPACT actually improved student performance on average

“I feel extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate with such a thoughtful group of policymakers,” Katz said, referring to her colleagues in the district. “They are very clearly committed to improving outcomes for students.”

Improving outcomes for public school students is what motivated Katz to attend the Curry School.

After completing her undergraduate degrees in anthropology and Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis, Katz accepted a position teaching sixth grade in south central Los Angeles as part of Teach for America. The experience was both challenging and transformative for Katz.

“When I was teaching in Los Angeles, I felt like I was on a sinking ship,” Katz said. “I witnessed the need for systemic change in our public education system, especially for urban schools.”

Her experiences in L.A. and with her students there catalyzed her decision to come to the Curry School.

“I’m inspired by my students, the lives I touched and maybe changed, and the ones that I couldn’t quite reach,” Katz said. “I think of them often and even keep a picture of them on my desk to remind me why I’m here.”

Katz’s research interests focus on efforts to improve teacher quality. She remains especially committed to evaluating policies that aim to improve teacher quality in urban schools.

Katz identified the opportunity to work closely with the policymakers and school leaders in the D.C. Public School System as being among the most significant experiences that have shaped her time at UVA. A close second is the high level of mentoring she has received.

“Jim Wyckoff has been an amazing mentor,” Katz said. “He has given me so many opportunities to do work that matters; he has encouraged me and supported me throughout my studies; and he sets an incredible example.”

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Katz has excelled as a doctoral student at the Curry School, and plenty of colleagues in the field have taken note. In 2013, Katz was invited to participate in the American Enterprise Institute’s Education Policy Academy. She was also awarded the American Educational Research Association’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship and the National Academy of Education’s Spencer 2015 Dissertation Fellowship.

“Veronica was a remarkable graduate student who, over the last six years, has become a colleague,” Wyckoff said. “She has been indispensable as we built the infrastructure to support our work with policymakers in District of Columbia Public Schools. She has written a great dissertation that is informing the academic literature on teacher incentives and teacher retention and the work of policymakers in D.C.,” he said.

Originally from Corvallis, Oregon, Katz had this to say when asked to name one thing she learned here that surprised her: “Charlottesville might be the perfect place to live,” she said.

It is no surprise, then, that Katz has decided to stay in Charlottesville and will begin her role as a post-doctoral research associate with EdPolicyWorks and the Curry School’s Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education upon graduation.

(Editor’s note: This is one of a series of profiles of members of the University of Virginia’s Class of 2017.)