Jennifer Borland will be attending the Teacher Quality Programs Summit June 14th–15th in Washington, D.C. Hosted by the U.S. Department of Educations for PI’s and evaluators of TQP, SEED and other DOE-funded projects, Jennifer will be attending in her capacity as lead evaluator on Radford University’s Appalachian Support for Specialized Education Training (ASSET) program. This event is invitation-only, though if you will be attending please get in touch!

Camellia Sanford-Dolly will be attending the 6th International Workshop on Advanced Learning Sciences, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, PA from June 6th to 8th, 2018. If you are planning to attend, feel free to get in touch! For more information, visit the IWALS website here.

Kristin Bass and Ruchita Patel will be attending the annual NIH SciEd Conference at the Metro Center in Washington, D.C., from May 29th to June 1st, 2018. Kristin will facilitate the breakout session “Addressing Successes and Challenges in Implementing Rigorous Evaluation Designs” on May 31st, at 11:00am – 12:15pm, and she is a panelist in the session “Where to Publish SEPA Outcomes” on May 30th, at 1:30pm – 2:45pm. She and Ruchita are also participating in a roundtable session with the Coastal Marine Biolabs’ NeuroLab project, for which REA is serving as the external evaluator.

If you will be there, please get in touch! For more information, view the conference website here.

Kristin Bass and Nisaa Kirtman are planning to attend AERA 2018 April 13–17 at the Millennium Broadway hotel in NYC. Please get in touch if you are interested in meeting! We look forward to this opportunity to connect with new and old colleagues and friends at this exciting venue.

Nisaa will be presenting a paper co-authored with Cynthia Char titled “Evaluating the Literacies in Engineering for Access and Participation (LEAP) Conference”on April 17 at 12:25 p.m. in Room 7.04. With funding from the NSF, the May 2017 Literacies in Engineering for Access and Participation (LEAP) conference brought together 40 scholars and educators in the equity, engineering, and literacy fields to develop an agenda for new research plans, collaborations, and practice in the field. The two-day conference highlighted issues of equity through practice and research on literacy learning in K-16 and informal engineering education, with a focus on learners from groups underrepresented in engineering.

That same day and time, in Room 7.02-7.03, Kristin will be presenting a paper co-authored with Dina Drits-Esser, Sheila Homburger, et al, titled “Development and Pilot Testing of an NGSS-Aligned Unit that Integrates Evolution and Heredity”. This paper describes the development and pilot test results of a Next Generation Science Standards-aligned eight-week evolution unit for ninth- and tenth-grade introductory biology students. The unit helps students build a coherent understanding of evolution through (a) inclusion of pertinent heredity core ideas; (b) analysis and interpretation of skill-level-appropriate data from published scientific research; (c) the construction of evidence-based arguments, and (d) the integration of crosscutting concepts such as patterns.