Recent Grants and Research Awards

Proyecto Maestría

Dr. Deborah Palmer - Bilingual/Bicultural Education
(August 2007)

The program in Bilingual/Bicultural Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction is pleased to announce that we have recently won a 5-year federal No Child Left Behind Title III Professional Development grant to provide scholarships to five cohorts of 10 area experienced bilingual teachers to enter our masters degree program, and then to support them with funding to serve as mentors in their schools and districts in the high-need area of bilingual/ESL education. The grant will also fund a summer institute to encourage practicing elementary teachers to enter the field of bilingual/ESL teaching and to provide them with the coursework and support necessary to do so. Assistant Professor Deb Palmer wrote the grant in collaboration with the Austin Independent School District, and will be coordinating the program, called Proyecto Maestría, or Masters Project in Spanish.

View degree information about the Proyecto Maestría Special Master's program

Presidential Timeline Award

Dr. Paul Resta
(August 2007)

Funding, $5,000 provided by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, will facilitate the expansion of the Presidential Timeline of the 20th Century through the addition of digital assets.  The Presidential Timeline is a website jointly created by the Learning Technology Center and the National Archives’ 12 presidential libraries and provides access to a growing store of digitized assets.  In addition to serving as a repository for digitized historical artefacts, the Presidential Timeline also includes biographical events, and major presidential challenges and decisions.

This website was chosen by eSchool News Online as Site of the Week on Wednesday, July 18, 2007.

View the Presidential Timeline website

Texas Space Consortium Award

Dr. Min Liu
(August 2007)

Dr. Liu received a grant for the Motivating Middle School Students to Learn Science and Assist them in Developing Problem-Solving Sills Through An Engaging New Media Enriched Space Program from the Texas Space Consortium to add gaming features to a problem-based learning program for middle science.

Summer Research Award

Dr. Deborah Palmer
(Summer 2006)

Dr. Palmer will receive a summer research award for her research project titled, "Exploring the implications of linguistic diversity in the classroom for teachers' effective management of discourse: How can bilingual teachers make talk 'accountable'?"

Dr. Palmer will continue analysis of a set of video data from a second grade dual immersion (Spanish/English) classroom, looking at the ways that teachers and students construct themselves within the discourse. In addition, she will begin to enlist Austin bilingual educators for a teacher-research group focused on the ways that bilingual classrooms differ from English-medium classrooms with regards to helping all students develop strong "academic identities" and helping teachers construct more equitable learning environments for diverse learners. Participating teacher-researchers will collect video data in their own classrooms, with Dr. Palmer's assistance.

Bridging the Gap Between Content Knowledge and
Practice: Improving Middle School Teachers' Content Knowledge and Classroom Practices

Dr. Susan Empson, Co-Principal Investigator
(September 2005 - August 2008)

The National Science Foundation, Teacher Professional Continuum (TPC) subcontracted ~$220,000 to Dr. Susan Empson, $1,046,044 total grant (Jennifer Knudsen, SRI International, PI; Nicole B. Shechtman, SRI International, Co-PI) for September 2005 through August 2008.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how professional development can help teachers use increased content knowledge in the classroom to better support students’ engagement in mathematics.

The Presidential Timeline

Dr. Paul E. Resta
(May 2005)

In May 2005, Dr. Resta received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a “We the People” project to promote understanding of American history and culture. Principal Investigator Paul E. Resta and his LTC team are working with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and ten other presidential libraries and document projects, the University of Texas at Austin Libraries UTOPIA Project, faculty in the Colleges of Education and Liberal Arts, and the Austin Independent School District (AISD) on the development of a Web-based resource to give the public access to the libraries’ rich archives of historical artifacts. The two-year, $233,000 project also includes funding from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation and the UTOPIA Project.

The “Presidential Timeline” Web site will feature an interactive timeline of the 20th century based on the administrations of American presidents. The timeline will contain digitized artifacts and primary historical resources, such as audio and video clips, photographs, and documents from the collections of the Presidential Libraries to illustrate or provide in-depth information on events. Teachers, students, and the general public will be able to examine original source materials that were available in the past only to serious scholars. The project will also include the development of curricular materials to allow teachers to effectively integrate the resources of the Presidential Timeline into their instruction.

Using Digital Games to Motivate Middle School Students

Dr. Min Liu

Digital games have the potential to create motivating environments that can engage learners in problem solving. Today's children grow up with digital games and playing digital games has become a part of many people's life. However, many commercial games have violent and inappropriate content. The purpose of this project is to begin the effort of developing highly engaging and empirical research based educational games to motivate middle school students to learn science. As an initial step, Dr. Liu and her research team will develop a gaming scenario and incorporate this scenario into a highly successful and award-winning program called Alien Rescue, and research the effect of new gaming features on motivation and learning.

Working with Teachers and Leveraging Technology to Scale Opportunities to Learn More Complex and Conceptually Difficult Middle School Mathematics

Dr. Susan Empson, Co-Principal Investigator (September 2004 - August 2008)

The National Science Foundation Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI), subcontracted $418,300 to Dr. Susan Empson, $5,900,000 total grant (Jeremy Rochelle, SRI International, PI; Jim Kaput, Univ. of Mass-Dartmouth; Bill Hopkins, Dana Center UT; Deborah Tartar, Virginia Polytechnic, Co-PIs.) for September 2004 through August 2008.

The SRI International research team was funded to experimentally study whether a wide variety of teachers can use technology and curriculum to create new opportunities for students to learn complex and conceptually difficult mathematics. Dr. Empson and her research team are responsible for a set of case studies within this larger experimental study with the goal of understanding how teaching practices vary in their support for the achievement of low and high achievers and whether some of these practices may be plausibly linked to closing achievement gaps.

Using Student-Generated Strategies in Instructional Interactions to Build Multiplicative Structures

Dr. Susan Empson, Principal Investigator
(June 2002 - May 2006)

The National Science Foundation, Applied Research, awarded $730,000 to Dr. Susan Empson for June 2002 through May 2006.

The purpose of this design experiment is to investigate the role of teachers’ interactions to support elementary students’ engagement with the mathematics of fractions. Dr. Empson and her research team focus in particular on students who struggle in mathematics and students who are English Language Learners.