Monthly News | March 2025 | | |
Each March, we celebrate Women’s History Month – a time to honor and celebrate the achievements, resilience, and leadership of women throughout history and in our own communities.
At the UC Irvine School of Education, we celebrate the incredible women advancing research, teaching and advocacy, driving innovation and expanding educational opportunities. Across education and beyond, women fight every day to break barriers, advocate for equity, and lead with strength. Their perseverance is not just inspiring – it is essential in shaping a more just and inclusive future.
As a top-ranked school where the majority of our faculty and staff are women, we take immense pride in advocating for women in the classroom, leadership and research spaces. We are committed to ensuring their contributions are valued, their voices amplified, and their impact celebrated.
This issue highlights just a few of the remarkable women making a lasting impact – Lena, Neda, Cecilia, Lourdes, and Katherine. I invite you to read their stories and join us in celebrating their achievements – not just this month, but every day.
Sincerely,
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Frances Contreras
Dean and Professor
UC Irvine School of Education
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In commemoration of Women's History Month, we spotlight five outstanding members of our community and highlight their accomplishments: students Lourdes Acevedo-Farag and Katherine Blanco, Assistant Professor Lena Shi, and Cecilia Leyva and Neda Moayedi, assistant director and director of the SAGE Scholars Program.
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Assistant Professor earns $700,000 grant and research fellowship
AI and education research expert Nia Nixon will use the Gates Foundation grant to develop AI-powered coaching tools for mathematics teachers in urban school districts. The $150,000, three-year Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship supports her work in leveraging AI to foster inclusivity in STEM education.
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Three teaching credential program students win prestigious bilingual education awards
Natalie Cabrera (left), Caroline Dyer and Dante Ruiz will receive the CABE Teachership Award at the upcoming CABE Conference on March 26-29; Cabrera is also the sole recipient of the nationwide NABE Teacher Scholarship. Additionally, BAP coordinator Susan Guilfoyle was selected as the Principal of the Day at Ralph A. Gates Elementary.
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APA adds Professor Stephanie Reich as Division 7 Fellow
The American Psychological Association for Developmental Psychology bestows fellow status to members who have shown evidence of unusual and outstanding contributions or performance in the field of psychology, having a national impact on the field. Reich holds an additional APA fellow status, and she is a fellow of the Society for Community Research and Action, Division 27 of APA. Of the 157,000 APA members, about 2% are selected as fellows.
| | School hosts California Statewide Family Engagement Center consortium | | The California Statewide Family Engagement Center (CA-SFEC), led by the Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE), hosted a two-day strategic planning workshop with the California Family and Community Engagement (CA-FACE) Initiative Team, part of Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation. With support from NAFSCE and UCI’s School of Education, participants collaborated to engage families, build practitioner capacity, and strengthen statewide systems. Dean Frances Contreras welcomed the group to UC Irvine’s campus, setting the stage for meaningful discussions. | | | |
School visits to two innovative schools in San Diego
A team of 13 administrators from OCEAN, Santa Ana Unified School District and Monroe Elementary toured Design39Campus and The Preuss School UC San Diego to explore best practices in student-centered learning, curriculum design, and university-school collaboration.
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Undergrad recognized for her work as a policy intern with invitation to White House
Brenda Ortiz Padilla was present as former President Joe Biden officially designated Chuckwalla National Monument, after the East Coachella Valley native championed the effort to protect the stunning desert landscape.
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Third-year Ph.D. student authors award winning paper
Victoria Nguyen's paper, "Bridging Environmental Science Education and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy on Social Media: A Case Study of Intersectional Environmentalists" won the 2025 AERA Environmental Education SIG Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award.
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Ph.D. student delivers strong performance in final round of systemwide competition
Congratulations to UC Irvine School of Education Ph.D. student Kunlei He for an outstanding performance at Grad Slam, making it to the finals with her presentation "Families in the Loop: Promoting Parent-Child Shared Reading with AI"! We’re proud of your hard work and dedication—well done!
Read abstract
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March 20 – Solidarity et al., presented by the UC Irvine History Project
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March 27 – NGSS Certification: Tier 2: Deepen Your Science Pedagogy with NGSS Certification Tier 2, presented by the UC Irvine Science Project
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April 5 – Solidarity et al., presented by the UC Irvine History Project
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April 10 – NGSS Certification: Tier 2: Deepen Your Science Pedagogy with NGSS Certification Tier 2, presented by the UC Irvine Science Project
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April 22 – Save the Date: UC Irvine Giving Day
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April 26 – Centering Students in Science Classrooms, presented by the UC Irvine Science Project
| Please visit the Teacher Academy website to view more upcoming workshops. | | - After the School of Education cohosted AI K-12 Deeper Learning Summit in February, time for reflection on how AI supports deeper learning (Getting Smart)
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Professor Liane Brouillette: “Editorial: One hundred years and counting: the international growth of Waldorf education.” In: Leadership in Education
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Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Eccles: “Reciprocal associations between confidence in getting social support and academic expectancies and subjective task values: Stronger for first-generation and transfer students.” In: The British Psychological Society
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Professor Gustavo Carlo and Doctoral Student Roushanac Partovi: “Varieties of altruistic actions across development and culture.” In: Journal for the Study of Education and Development
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Postdoctoral Scholar Jeffrey DeVries and Professor Richard Arum: “Student and teacher intellectual humility at a diverse research university: the role of academic, demographic, and behavioral metrics.” In: Studies in Higher Education
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Doctoral Students Kunlei He, Kelsyann Cervera, and Julian Levine, Associate Professor Penelope Collins, and Distinguished Professor Mark Warschauer: “Promoting Parent-Child Shared Reading with a Bilingual Conversational Agent.” In: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
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Associate Professor Jade Jenkins: “Do Preschool Peers Create a Sustaining Environment in Kindergarten? Evidence from the ECLS-K: 2011.” In: AERA OPEN
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Doctoral Student Jinwon Kim and Professor Di Xu: “Not ALL Delay is Procrastination: Analyzing Subpatterns of Academic Delayers in Online Learning.” In: LAK 2025
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Doctoral Students Joseph Hin Yan Lam and Molly Leachman, and Professor Elizabeth Peña: “Factor structure and longitudinal changes in bilinguals' oral narratives production: role of language exposure, language-domain proficiency, and transfer.” In: Applied Psycholinguistics
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Doctoral Student Molly Leachman and Professor Young-Suk Kim: “The Relation Between Text Reading and Reading Comprehension Varies as a Function of Developmental Phase, Orthographic Depth, and Measurement Characteristics: Evidence From a Meta-Analysis.” In: Journal of Educational Psychology
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Assistant Professor Nia Nixon, Undergraduate Student Danielle Shariff and Doctoral Student Jaeyoon Choi: “Understanding Collaborative Learning Processes and Outcomes Through Student Discourse Dynamics.” In: LAK 2025
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Assistant Professor Nia Nixon: “The Use of Large Language Models in Education.” In: International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
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Professor Emerita Carol Booth Olson and Postdoctoral Researcher Huy Chung: “Conducting a national expansion of a text-based argument writing intervention for secondary students using a cognitive strategies approach.” In: Journal of Educational Psychology
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Professor Emerita Carol Booth Olson: “Contextualized Language Instruction to Support Multilingual Learners of English for Academic Writing.” In: The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching
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Professor Stephanie Reich: “Mothers' and fathers' emotion socialization: Longitudinal relations with toddlers' social competence.” In: Infant Behavior and Development
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Professor Lindsey Richland: “Uncertainty and perceptions of competence under pressure: Affective and motivational consequences of relative feedback during cognitive performance.” In: Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
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Doctoral Student Mohammad Amin Samadi, Undergraduate Student Danielle Shariff and Assistant Professor Nia Nixon: “Balancing the Scales: Using GPT-4 for Robust Data Augmentation.” In: Companion Proceedings 15th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge
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Professor Sandra Simpkins and Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Eccles: “Impact of mothers’ and fathers’ math self-concept of ability, child-specific beliefs and behaviors on girls’ and boys’ math self-concept of ability.” In: PLOS One
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Lecturer Nelly Tsai and Associate Professor Hosun Kang: “Individual Awareness to Systemic Action: Expanding Students' Project with Civic Action Matrix.” In: The Science Teacher
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Distinguished Professor Mark Warschauer: “Co-designing Curriculum to Discuss Environmental Disparities Using Data Science.” In: SIGCSETS 2025: Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2
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Distinguished Professor Mark Warschauer: “Teacher Decisions and Perspectives in Scratch TIPP&SEE Implementation.” In: SIGCSETS 2025: Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1
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Professor Di Xu: “Humanizing college online instruction: The effects of professional development on faculty perceptions and instructional practices.” In: The Internet and Higher Education
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