OFRS Faculty Research Awards

This project will support three cohorts of five undergraduate computer science students through scholarships, training, mentoring, and leadership roles as well as investigate and address factors for STEM student success. The objectives of the project are to (a) improve the educational opportunities for and retention of traditionally underrepresented students in computer science and (b) understand the social cognitive, psychological and cultural factors and curricular/co-curricular interventions that promote academic success and retention in computer science. 

 A.J. Metz and Karen Tao are Co-PIs on the grant along with PI David Johnson who is a professor in Computer Science. We will be examining various aspects of the project, including students' basic scholastic and persistence skills, their sense of belonging through structured activities, outcomes related to mentoring, and how leadership roles influence retention and persistence attitudes. 

EPIC Bioscience (Engaging Practices for Inquiry with Collections in Bioscience) is a collaborative project between the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, encompassing an interdisciplinary team with expertise in learning research (PI Kirsten Butcher), collections research and bioscience (co-PI Mitchell Power) and museum education (co-PI Madlyn Runburg).

 EPIC Bioscience will be an online learning environment that uses authentic research investigations with digitized collections from the Natural History Museum of Utah to create an NGSS-aligned curriculum for middle school students. Modern collections-based research – using objects from museum collections to answer cutting-edge research questions – offers a potential solution to the problem of creating engaging and contextualized science investigations that engage middle school learners in key science practices and disciplinary core ideas.

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) may be defined as any computer-based learning environment that customizes instruction based on students’ needs, interests, and mastery of a topic. ITS have captured considerable attention and gained increasing recognition as effective instructional tools because of their potential to have a positive effect on learning. While much progress has been made in psychotherapy training to deliver timely, useful, and constructive feedback, there is a pressing need for scalable and automated solutions that facilitate mentoring of novices with expert therapists. Recent advances in natural dialogue processing algorithms has led to innovative solutions to the problem of analyzing written dialogue at large scales and classify utterances. This project aims to develop and evaluate an ITS that leverages natural language processing algorithms for automated formative feedback to promote skill acquisition in a collaborative learning environment in the domain of mental health counseling.

Led by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), Degrees When Due (DWD) is a new initiative intended to support states’ scaling of degree reclamation policies that increase degree completion for populations with “some college, no degree.”  Dr. Jason Taylor is leading the research on the DWD initiative which will examine the impact of DWD on students’ educational and employment outcomes, state and institutional policy adoption and change, the impact on reducing equity gaps in degree completion, and the impact of innovative models that help students return to college to complete their degrees.

Collaboration between the University of Utah, Utah State Board of Education and Juvenile Justice Services (JJS) to provide professional development training to school and JJS personnel to implement the Advancing Decision Making and Problem Solving (ADAPT) program in school and justice settings. Funding supports monthly web-based training for school and JJS personnel through the use of interactive video conference technology utilizing the Telehealth Training Laboratory (TTL).

The Utah State Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health (DSAMH) has been awarded the Utah State Youth Treatment Implementation (UT SYT-I) grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The goal of grant is to improve screening, treatment, and recovery support services for adolescents (12-18) and transition-aged youth (16-25) with substance use disorders or co-occurring mental health disorders. Drs. Jason Burrow-Sánchez and Aaron Fischer in the Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education at the University of Utah are partnering with DSAMH in order to provide training, consultation, and technical assistance for the grant project; training areas include: a) adolescent social and biological development, b) evidence-based screening, assessment, and diagnostic tools for adolescent substance use disorders, c) the use of technology in the provision of behavioral health services for adolescents, and d) adolescent treatment engagement and retention.

This project is a collaboration between the Salt Lake City School District and University of Utah Department of Educational Psychology, and seeks to support the mental and behavioral health needs of students with disabilities, particularly those with or at risk for social-emotional problems.  Graduate students from the U of U integrate into a diverse middle school settings to improve the mental health needs of all students, while using a multitiered systems of support framework.

This project addresses an understudied and under-theorized topic in higher education: generational education status within the professoriate. To investigate and understand the experiences of individuals with first-generation educational status who pursue or intend to pursue tenure-track faculty positions on college campuses, this project will directly engage graduate students with first generation educational status about their graduate experiences and socialization into academe.

The Tiered Behavior Support Program (TBSP) represents a partnership between The University of Utah Department Of Educational Psychology and Salt Lake City School District. The goal of this grant is to investigate innovative intervention modalities in schools and support elementary school teachers and students with significant behavior needs. This partnership will provide masters and doctoral level students from the University of Utah with the opportunity to provide direct behavioral services to elementary school students with problem behavior and build teacher capacity to intervene in the least restrictive environment.

-This is a joint project between the College of Education and the College of Science and involves faculty from Ed Psych, ECS, Special Education, UITE, Department of Physics and Astronomy, CSME, and Department of Mathematics.
-The goal of this grant is to create coherent STEM learning opportunities for pre-service elementary teachers across courses in the College of Education and the College of Science

The Prescription Drug Overdose, Abuse and Misuse Prevention Program is part of the CDC Prevention for States FOA CE15-1501 grant. This grant will fund a study to Identify which risk stratification and mitigation strategies (RSMS; e.g., Urine drug screens, CSD reports, psychological/risk assessments) predict aberrant patient behaviors. By better understanding which RSMS are effective, we may be able to more accurately determine at-risk individuals, ultimately decreasing the incidence of abuse/misuse and related complications including overdose and death.

Led by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), Degrees When Due (DWD) is a new initiative intended to support states’ scaling of degree reclamation policies that increase degree completion for populations with “some college, no degree.”  Dr. Jason Taylor is leading the research on the DWD initiative which will examine the impact of DWD on students’ educational and employment outcomes, state and institutional policy adoption and change, the impact on reducing equity gaps in degree completion, and the impact of innovative models that help students return to college to complete their degrees.

This project will apply statistical natural language processing methodology to the evaluation of patient-provider communication. 

The U-TTEC Lab, in partnership with Granite School District (GSD), is developing and implementing a district-wide Behavior Support Response Team (BSRT). The primary goal of this partnership is to support the behavioral needs of general education students within the district. The GSD BSRT aims to build capacity within the district to effectively manage behavior problems, while reducing placement and/or program changes for students with problem behavior. Services include the following components: training, coaching, and supervision of graduate students. Doctoral and Master’s level graduate research assistants in Special Education and School Psychology, and faculty within those programs provide these services. Additionally, this project allows graduate students the opportunity to gain school-based experience towards their Board Certification in Behavior Analysis.

The Telehealth Training Laboratory (TTL) is designed to train Counseling and School Psychology graduate students in the use of telehealth. The TTL will significantly impact student training and future professionals practice by integrating technology to geographically expand the scope of behavioral healthcare services they can provide.

As iPads and tablets have gained popularity, so too have the number of educational apps for children. The interactivity, allowing readers to explore and play with the story, make these storybook apps unique from their print version, and from ebook versions of the same story.

The embedded interactions provide children with fun elements that can deepen their engagement with the story, and often offer narrative details that can increase children’s understanding of the story. Yet, despite the current popularity of these apps and diverse formats of these embedded interactions, there are no existing guidelines or best practices to guide the field about how, when, and why to embed interactions in storybook apps. Further, there is no existing evidence about the types of interactions in which young readers will spontaneously engage while they work with storybook apps.

Specifically, little is known about the interactions that young readers spontaneously choose to implement and the story elements with which young readers attempt to interact, nor about the degree to which their attempted interactions are successful, and the effect that might have on subsequent interaction attempts. This study will examine the patterns of young readers’ spontaneous interactions with storybook apps, using detailed coding of readers’ behaviors as they read a set of storybook apps individually. The results will increase the existing knowledge of children’s behaviors in engaging with storybook apps.

The quality of the therapeutic relationship is foundational to effect mental health counseling, but the tools for evaluating it rely on human felt sense. In this pilot project we will explore signal processing technology for evaluating the real-time interaction of therapists and clients.

The U-TTEC Lab, in partnership with Granite School District (GSD), is developing and implementing a district-wide Behavior Support Response Team (BSRT). The primary goal of this partnership is to support the behavioral needs of general education students within the district. The GSD BSRT aims to build capacity within the district to effectively manage behavior problems, while reducing placement and/or program changes for students with problem behavior. Services include the following components: training, coaching, and supervision of graduate students. Doctoral and Master’s level graduate research assistants in Special Education and School Psychology, and faculty within those programs provide these services. Additionally, this project allows graduate students the opportunity to gain school-based experience towards their Board Certification in Behavior Analysis.

The Teacher Recruiting in Mild/Moderate (TRIMM) licensure project was funded by the Utah State Board of Education. This grant will help address the Special Education teacher shortage in Utah by providing financial support to a 2-year cohort of 10 students (5 graduate and 5 undergraduate) pursuing their degree and licensure in Special Education with an emphasis in Mild/Moderate Disabilities at the University of Utah.”

The University of Utah Project to Prepare New Early Childhood Special Educators (U-ECSE) will deliver a comprehensive licensure program in preschool special education/early intervention to one cohort of 10 new teacher candidates in urban and rural areas in Utah. The U-ECSE program will be delivered through a combination of an on-campus program and an internet-based vided conferencing (IVC) system supported by the Utah Education Network (UEN) for distance delivery.

Dr. Leanne Hawken and Dr. Heidi Mathie Mucha provide coaching and evaluation for the Utah Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (UMTSS) project. The UMTSS project is federally funded by the Office of Special Education Programs and the goal of the project is to help local education agencies scale up implementation of multi-tiered academic and behavior support systems.

The Bringing Theory to Practice Grant from the American Association of Colleges and Universities focuses on a racial justice dialogue series at the University of Utah designed to engage students, faculty, staff and administrators in racial justice allyism, advocacy, and community-building.

This study will implement CICO to increase engagement with students identified as having internalizing behavior problems by providing explicit examples of how to meet school-wide behavior expectations. Additionally, this study will be an important contribution to the literature base dedicated to the implementation of effective and efficient interventions to support mental health in the elementary school settings. It will also provide educators with an effective evidenced-based Tier 2 intervention that requires minimal resources to support students with internalizing behavior problems.

Simulation-based methods allow researchers to reproduce and model learner behaviors to evaluate and improve the adaptive capabilities of open-ended learning environments. This study aims to conduct a series of computer simulations to examine the impact of different algorithms for a recommended system embedded in nBrowser, an intelligent web browser designed to support teachers in designing lesson plans that implement technologies into STEM classrooms.

The study will evaluate whether increased progress monitoring, goal setting and incentives can improve the diagnostic accuracy of Kindergarten reading screening measures.

The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of a Tier 2 intervention with 6th grade students with learning disabilities and speech and language impairments. The intervention is designed to supplement fractions instruction and intended to increase students’ mathematical reasoning skills.