Co-Principal Investigators: Robert Pianta and James Wyckoff

The focus of this training program is to prepare postdoctoral fellows to conduct rigorous education research in topics related to effective teachers and teaching practices, early learning, and social and behavioral contexts for learning. The program will be based at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education in two interdisciplinary research centers—the Center for the Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and the Center of Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness (Ed Policy Works). Three fellows will be hired for 2 to 3 years each and will work with the mentors on their funded projects, which include exploration, development, efficacy, and effectiveness studies.

Training includes four main components: (1) individualized work with a senior investigator, (2) experience learning and using rigorous methods and statistics, (3) immersion in a scientifically rigorous community of scholarship, and (4) mentored experiences in consultation with educational stakeholders (e.g., state/federal agencies, district policy-makers, and practitioner groups). The goal of these experiences is to provide fellows with a rich array of experiences that will not only hone their research expertise (e.g., theory, experimental design, methods, and writing) but also expose them to decision-making at the intersection of research, policy, and practice. Specifically, fellows will increase their substantive knowledge about teacher effectiveness and develop technical skills to apply methods supporting causal inference through hands-on experience in experimental and quasi-experimental methods.

Publications

Pahlke, E., and Goble, P. (2015). Gender and Education. In J.D. Wright (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed., pp. 682–688). Cambridge, MA: Elsevier, Inc.

Journal article, monograph, or newsletter

Sandilos, L.E., Cycyk, L.M., Hammer, C.S., Sawyer, B.E., Lopez, L.M., and Blair, C. (2015). Depression, Control, and Climate: An Examination of Factors Impacting Teaching Quality in Preschool Classrooms. Early Education and Development, 26(8): 1111–1127.