My research focuses on the core academic mission of postsecondary institutions and emphasizes how policies, programs, and practices shape students’ educational experiences and success. Specifically, my work falls into three overlapping areas of equity-centered inquiry: the academic engagement, development, and outcomes of diverse students; the working conditions that support faculty members’ use of effective practices to foster student success; and applied research design. My goal as a researcher is further knowledge in service of shaping policies, programs, and practices that increase learning, inclusion, and social justice for all members of the higher education community. As such, I seek out opportunities to engage in interdisciplinary research-practice partnerships and to disseminate findings through a variety of mediums.
Further, I am committed to conducting rigorous research that provides a rich understanding of these issues. To this end, I strive to employ robust longitudinal and mixed methods research designs and to complement design with multiple analytic methods. In service of this commitment, I have developed expertise in survey research and interview designs, issues of measurement, and advanced quantitative modeling, including propensity scores, latent variables, social networks, and multilevel fixed and random effects regression. Across my areas of inquiry, I approach research with a critical feminist stance, examining the potential for liberatory practice in postsecondary education and educational research.
My inquiries into students’ academic engagement, development, and college success focus on instructional and curricular practices. For instance, I have conducted two studies that directly examined instructional practices in STEM disciplines. Through a partnership with a faculty member in Engineering, I led the design and implementation of a partially experimental longitudinal study of students’ behaviors, perceptions, and performance in a newly redesigned course that emphasized active and collaborative learning activities. I have also contributed to a cluster randomized study of collaborative learning in Computer Science funded by the National Science Foundation; for this project, I worked collaboratively on the research design with a focus on survey methods, and I led data collection and management. Both of the above single-institution studies leveraged multiple sources of student-level data, including course assignments, metadata from course management systems, institutional records, and surveys. I also have expertise in multi-institutional, longitudinal studies of college impact. For instance, I have used quantitative data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education to examine the effectiveness of first-year seminars for students’ persistence and degree attainment, as well as how students’ perceptions of teaching reflect systemic bias based on their cognitive traits. As part of the Promoting At-Promise Student Success project, I have used multilevel mixed methods approaches to explore how the structures and practices of a loose-cohort learning community model might contribute to first-year social-emotional wellbeing and academic achievement for low-income students, many of whom are also racially minoritized and first-generation college students.
Beyond a focus on students’ academic experiences and outcomes, my research also examines organizational issues related to the academic enterprise. For instance, I have used quantitative data from the national Faculty Survey of Student Engagement to investigate the organizational, disciplinary, and professional influences on instructors’ emphasis of liberatory cognitive development in their course design, as well as single-institution survey data to better understand how non-tenure-track faculty interpret organizational behaviors in terms of communicating a commitment to the success. Through the Delphi Center for the Changing Faculty and Student Success, my recently published report details the potential for liberatory design thinking to be used to enhance equity in higher education, based on three institutional case studies where new policies, programs, and practices were created that improved conditions for non-tenure-track faculty. As a companion to the report, I also developed a toolkit in the use of the design for equity in higher education framework that emerged from this study that offers practical guidance for institutional committees and task forces to engage in change efforts.
My third line of inquiry explicitly deals with issues of equity in research design, with a focus on survey measurement and quantitative analyses. This strand of research challenges existing practices using a critical feminist lens and offers more inclusive alternatives. For instance, using data from the Wabash National Study, I created a new construct to measure critical being, an alternative to critical thinking that includes not only cognitive skills and dispositions but also social awareness and responsibility. The critical being construct is not only conceptually more inclusive, but differences based on students’ social identity characteristics were far less for critical being compared to their scores on the standardized critical thinking test included in the study, demonstrating how research choices can perpetuate privilege. Another recently published project examines two competing conceptualizations of rigor, demonstrating that cognitive challenge contributes to students' cognitive outcomes, whereas course workload generally does not; the results of this study have the potential to increase equity especially for students who experience time poverty. This line of inquiry contributes to the development of the field of critical quantitative research by revealing the complex relationships of concepts, data, and analysis in applied educational research. My work in this area also has profound implications for practice, including in how researchers measure and assess student development, as well as how postsecondary administrators evaluate instructional effectiveness.
Across these three areas, my research has resulted in 14 publications in peer-reviewed journals, in addition to a number of book chapters, reports, and policy briefs. I have also engaged my research on higher education through more than 30 presentations at national and international conferences, including practitioner-focused conferences and disciplinary conferences outside of education, as well as leading a number of institution-specific presentations and workshops for administrators, student affairs professionals, and faculty members.
Recently, I have designed an action research project to help institutional design teams improve policies and professional development opportunities to better support non-tenure-track faculty; this project is currently in the recruitment phase. I have also recently submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation to fill the significant gap in our understanding of faculty in the United States left by the discontinuation of the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty. The proposal employs a framework that centers faculty members’ intersectional identities and roles, as well as the institutional responsibility for creating supportive working conditions that foster faculty members’ opportunities to be successful. In my ongoing research, I will continue to do the following: submit competitive grant proposals to conduct research that is grounded in critical feminist approaches; seek collaborations with scholars, practitioners, and community members to improve equity and effectiveness in the core academic mission of higher education; center people in the research I conduct, recognizing the subjective nature of research as a means to better understand multiple truths and realities; and reflect a commitment to my own sustained learning and development as central to my contributions to the field.