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Project Descriptions
Spring 2026

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Showing 27 projects out of 27 found. On page 1 out of 1.
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MOVES-NL: Digital Solutions for Coordinating Enactive and Symbolic Perspectives—The Case of Basic Arithmetic With Positive and Negative Integers

Dor Abrahamson - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

We present an innovative educational design for basic arithmetic that responds to students’ documented difficulties with adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. The design utilizes MOVES, a technological architecture that combines floor- and screen-projected interactive interfaces. Students enact arithmetic operations, e.g., “3 - (-2)” by walking along a projected...

 Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Geometry Resources in Dance (GRiD): Design-based educational research of an innovative gridded floor mat for students to objectify their tacit attentional anchors for movement coordination into auxiliary lines for geometric practice

Dor Abrahamson - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

What do dancing and geometrical proof have in common? Turns out that in both of these disparate practices, we imagine lines to solve the common problem of perceptually engaging the environment to perform sensorimotor tasks. In dance, these lines have been called “attentional anchors.” In geometry, these lines are called...

 Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Strengthening Early Childhood Systems Through Networks: Alumni Engagement, Campus Partnerships, and Community Outreach Sponsored by UC Berkeley Equity & Excellence in Early Childhood (E3C) (interdisciplinary initiative across education, public policy, public health, social welfare, psychology, and affiliated centers)

Katie Albright, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

E3C is building a public-impact alliance to strengthen early childhood systems in California. This URAP role will help E3C grow and connect three networks that help make systems change possible: (1) our alumni network, (2) internal interdisciplinary connections across UC Berkeley centers and programs, and (3) community and public...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences   Biological & Health Sciences

Developing Language and Academic Supports for Indigenous Maya Students in California Schools (Yucatec Maya)

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Background: In 2016, voters in the state of California passed Assembly Bill (AB) 2016 which now requires an ethnic studies curriculum for grades 7-12. In a state where the Latinx student population is 3,284,788 or 56.1% of all students in the state, the new ethnic studies requirement invites a deeper...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology   Arts & Humanities

Maya Mam Language Activism in Guatemala and the US

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Background: Mam is one of the Mayan languages whose ancestral community spans southern Mexico and western Guatemala. According to the Censo Nacional de Poblacion y VII de Vivienda (2018), there are 842, 252 Mam speakers living in Guatemala, with the largest communities in Huehuetenango, San Marcos, and Quetzaltenango. This project...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology   Arts & Humanities

Policies in Higher Education that Promote Access for Undocumented Students

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project aims to understand the impact of current immigration policies on undocumented students' pursuit of higher education. Its goals are twofold: (1) to identify which immigration policies in the United States support higher education for undocumented students, and (2) to determine whether Higher Education Serving Institutions (HSIs) and Emerging...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology   Arts & Humanities

The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO): Undergraduate Research Apprentice (Role 1 of 3)

Travis Bristol - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Background: The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO), launched by Faculty Director Travis J. Bristol, at UC Berkeley School of Education, uses research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO): Undergraduate Research Apprentice (Role 2 of 3)

Travis Bristol - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Background: The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO), launched by Faculty Director Travis J. Bristol, at UC Berkeley School of Education, uses research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO): Undergraduate Research Apprentice (Role 3 of 3)

Travis Bristol - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Background: The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO), launched by Faculty Director Travis J. Bristol, at UC Berkeley School of Education, uses research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Rater Effects in School-Based Mental Health Screening: A Mixed-Method Approach

Maggie Chan - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Universal social-emotional and behavioral (SEB) screening in school is a recognized solution to the mental health crisis among children and youth. However, the effectiveness of school-based SEB screening to address this public health concern is contingent on the fairness and validity of the assessments. Most SEB screeners are...

California Puzzle: Expanding Children's Access to Preschool

Bruce Fuller - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

California is spending billions to widen children's access to affordable preschool. But the growth of the governor's favored program appears to be killing-off existing pre-K centers. This project delves into this unanticipated dynamic and how to prevent greater erosion of preschool supply. The affordability of families (or lack...

Toward Equity by Design

Kris Gutierrez - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project seeks undergraduates who are interested in learning about how to design learning environments that center equity, sustainability, and the radical transformation of systems of inequality that emerge in educational contexts. Specifically, undergraduates will engage readings, data, and collaborate with other undergraduates and graduate students to develop analyses for...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

The Coloniality of Statewide Literacy Testing and #OptOut as a Decolonial Option

Kris Gutierrez - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The anti-testing opt-out movement is a grassroots movement in which parents/guardians choose not to have their children participate in their school’s statewide testing. This research is a social media ethnography in which we critically examine the discourse used in posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Writing Data Stories

Kris Gutierrez - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Writing Data Stories is a new project that seeks to reorganize how young people, especially linguistically and ethnoracially minoritized students, learn about and interact with data. A partnership including Bay Area schools, UC Berkeley, the Concord Consortium, North Carolina State University and the University of Texas at Austin, the project...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

[]-Space: Co-designing a culturally sensitive makerspace

Kris Gutierrez - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

This research project originated from a longstanding relationship between the Pinoleville Pomo Nation from Northern California and an interdisciplinary research group from UC Berkeley. After conversations with the Tribal Council and researchers’ participation in tribal gatherings, issues around well-being, and education were identified as areas of common interest. One...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

AI’s Potential to Reframe Student Agency and Democratic Participation in Educational Contexts (K-12 and Higher Education): Perspectives from Student Leaders

Özge Hacifazlioglu - Professor , Berkeley School of Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The paradox of progress in educational technology is that, while it aims to enhance student engagement and facilitate personalized learning paths, it often overlooks the diverse personal and sociocultural realities of students’ lives. The challenge lies in balancing the allure of technological solutions with the complex socio-cultural contexts that...

Signature Pedagogies in Developing Leaders

Özge Hacifazlioglu - Professor , Berkeley School of Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Location: On Campus

Over the past two decades research on leadership preparation has focused on exploring signature pedagogies to cater for the needs of leaders who serve students from diverse backgrounds. This led scholars to design and enact equity-centered culturally responsive approaches in alignment with their context (Painter and Clark, 2015; Hacıfazlıoğlu...

Exploring Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) K–12 Educator Experiences in the Literature

Kourtney Kawano - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This project is a systematic review of AANHPI teachers and how they are discussed across peer-reviewed scholarship to date. The project's goals are to 1) map the field of research on AANHPI K–12 educators by identifying peer-reviewed sources published to date, 2) examine thematic trends in how...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Determining predictors of executive function performance in children.

Dana Miller-Cotto - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

This research is a mixed methods research project which aims to understand the predictors of executive function, a cognitive resource that controls our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, and its performance in early schooling. In particular, we study the 1) role of how context may play a role in executive function...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology

Determining how context shapes children's executive function performance.

Dana Miller-Cotto - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Executive function, or our ability to hold information in mind, ignore distractions, and shift between goals, predicts many important outcomes in life, including educational outcomes and social development. Research indicates that there are differences in how children display executive function skills across race/ethnicity and socio-economic status. There is...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology

Supporting undergraduate success with AI adaptive tutoring and course recommendation

Zachary Pardos - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The AskOski project (https://askoski.berkeley.edu/about) is a research and development effort led by Professor Pardos to transfer the latest in big data and machine learning research to the domain of course guidance in higher ed. The recommender system is live in-production at Berkeley, with partial deployments at several...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Expanding a free content library for an open-source adaptive tutoring system using large language models

Zachary Pardos - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Adaptive tutoring systems are designed to provide students in K-12 and intro college courses a personalized homework experience. This means giving the right problem to a student at the right time based on a continuous assessment of their mastery of a skill. At Berkeley, the ALEKS system is used...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

AI, Algorithms, and Accountability in Education, YEDI-affiliated

Eos Trinidad - Professor , Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

This research focuses on how Generative AI, predictive algorithms, and school accountability (i.e., AAA) are transforming instruction, student engagement, and interpersonal relationships in higher education. Using in-depth longitudinal interviews of undergraduate and graduate students, the study attempts to understand not just how technologies affect humans, but also how technologies...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

How Chicago Thinkers Shaped Modern American Education: An Intellectual History from Dewey and Friedman to Heckman and Ewing

Eos Trinidad - Professor , Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Among the most interesting, controversial, and consequential decisions in education policies have emerged from social scientists in Chicago. The likes of John Dewey, Jane Adams, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Dan Lortie, James Coleman, Anthony Bryk, James Heckman, and Eve Ewing have contributed to important research that influenced democratic schooling, school...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Research and Evaluation of the Berkeley Psychedelic Facilitation Program

Tina Trujillo - Professor, Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

At the Berkeley Psychedelic Facilitation Program, three cohorts of advanced professionals (110 in total) learned how to safely, effectively, and equitably support clients, patients, and study participants in psychedelic-assisted healing and research settings. For the past three academic years, the Program welcomed cohorts of learners to participate in a...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Critically Conscious Computing Research: Pre-service teacher programs

Michelle Wilkerson - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

My research so far has focused on how teacher education programs incorporate justice and critical consciousness into K-12 computer science curricula. By investigating both their theoretical foundations and the lived experiences of CS pre-service teachers (PSTs), I have found significant variance in how these programs prepare educators to...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology   Engineering, Design & Technologies

Critical Reasoning for College Readiness: An assessment development project in computational thinking

Mark Wilson - Professor, Education

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Critical Reasoning for College Readiness (CR4CR) is a project that seeks to develop psychometrically sound assessments that can be used by teachers in the classrooms at the high school and early college levels. Our goal is to develop, revise, and validate a suite of assessments, including unique assessment tasks and...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science

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