The Grants Office at the Pitt School of Education provides a monthly update of new grants and news. In fiscal year 2021, there was $15.6 million in external grant funding for more than 70 research projects.
Our faculty pursue research that innovates and agitates. Their work reflects the school’s mission of approaching learning as intertwined with health, wellness, and human development.
Principal Investigator: Eboni Zamani-Gallaher
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: Transformation Enablers Pilot – Pathways Providers
Agency Name: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 7/31/24
Amount: $76,607 (Pitt portion) $1,474,152 (Overall)
The purpose of this project is to fund the integration of the Community College Research, Praxis and Leadership (CCRPL @ Pitt) efforts through the Office of the Associate Dean for Equity, Justice and Strategic Partnerships as a new transformation enabler service provider in the BMGF Service, Design and Delivery (SD&D) ecosystem. This project will align with and reinforce established objectives for the Align Key Partners portfolio outcomes (e.g., optimizing efficiency and effectiveness of quality service requests and deliveries to enable service at scale made from established solutions and capacities providers to enable continuous improvement). Core CCRPL @ Pitt staff will participate in a networked-improvement community (NIC) comprised of all capacities and Pathways providers, as well as 1:1 consultation and planning with SOVA Solutions, contributions to a shared online space for collaboration following foundational topics such as understanding equity principles, integrated framework dependencies, broader marketplace collaborations etc. Hence, CCRPL @ Pitt service offerings and integration of those offerings into the SD&D ecosystem. Support from this grant will be used to guide and leverage content expertise in offering technical assistance and coaching to community college stakeholders.
Principal Investigator: Eboni Zamani-Gallaher
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: Equity in Action Business Development Project
Agency Name: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 12/31/24
Amount: $236,572 (Pitt portion) $623,826 (Overall)
The primary outcome of this support is structured to support advancement of technical assistance in providing equity in Pathways implementation in the postsecondary ecosystem. This award is designed to assess needs and responsiveness to requests for equity-related supports from institutions prioritizing transformation via Guided Pathways. To that end, organizational analysis, documenting strategic partnerships and initiatives that in crafting organizational assets to share strategic priorities specific to community college research, praxis, and leadership that bolsters incremental credentialing pathways to credentials of value. Through this set of activities, Pitt SOE will be recognized for talent building and support for scaling collaborations that are responsive to institutional demand for race forward, equity-centered community college specific subject-matter-experts that can aid community college practitioners in addressing racialized equity gaps.
Principal Investigator: Eboni Zamani-Gallaher
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: Training Future Oriented Colleges to Enable Youth and Adults for Mobility
Agency Name: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 7/31/24
Amount: $485,020 (Pitt portion) $1,265,020 (Overall)
The purpose of this project is to fund the integration of the Community College Research, Praxis and Leadership (CCRPL @ Pitt) efforts through the Office of the Associate Dean for Equity, Justice and Strategic Partnerships as a new transformation enabler service provider in the BMGF Service, Design and Delivery (SD&D) ecosystem. This project will align with and reinforce established objectives for the Align Key Partners portfolio outcomes (e.g., optimizing efficiency and effectiveness of quality service requests and deliveries to enable service at scale made from established solutions and capacities providers to enable continuous improvement). Core CCRPL @ Pitt staff will participate in a networked-improvement community (NIC) comprised of all capacities and Pathways providers, as well as 1:1 consultation and planning with SOVA Solutions, contributions to a shared online space for collaboration following foundational topics such as understanding equity principles, integrated framework dependencies, broader marketplace collaborations etc. Hence, CCRPL @ Pitt service offerings and integration of those offerings into the SD&D ecosystem. Support from this grant will be used to guide and leverage content expertise in offering technical assistance and coaching to community college stakeholders.
Principal Investigator: Stefano Bagnato
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: SPECS for Include Me research grant
Agency Name: Arc of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Department of Education-Bureau of Special Education
Award Dates: 7/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $65,000
Stefano Bagnato, Ed.D., NCSP, Professor of Psychology & Pediatrics in the Department of Psychology-in-Education, Applied Developmental Psychology Program, is recipient of a contract renewal with the Arc of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Department of Education-Bureau of Special Education. The contract, SPECS for Include Me, is the 14th year of a longitudinal program evaluation research effort to evaluate the quality and impact of an innovative teacher inclusion mentoring initiative entitled “Include Me (IM)” involving a collaboration among Dr. Bagnato’s SPECS team at ADP/HHD; The UCLID-LEND Disabilities Institute at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and the Arc of PA and PDE. IM is a Pennsylvania-wide initiative of the Arc of PA to partner with nearly 200 school districts to collaborate on the transition of students (K-12th grade) with severe developmental disabilities from segregated to inclusive classroom settings in their local schools. Throughout over a decade, IM has engaged in a mentoring process with over 1200 students and parents; 2000 teachers and administrators, and 200 school districts in this highly successful and positive program. SPECS research has demonstrated the quality, impact, and outcomes of individualized mentoring of varying content and intensities with parents and professionals and the positive impact on student behavior and achievement, improved teacher instructional and management practices; parent advocacy; and attitudes about inclusion and improvements in overall school and classroom climate. This next phase in IM involves Arc and PDE collaborations with a smaller set of specific school districts and to focus on all students with individualized needs with the district rather than with only single dyads of students and parents and teachers.
Principal Investigator: Jennifer Ely
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Student Mental Health Promotion Project
Agency Name: Fox Chapel Area School District
Award Dates: 7/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $210,600
The School Mental Health Project provides students from kindergarten through 12th grade access to highly qualified and trained behavioral health professionals within the district. This $206,475.00 grant is an extension of a long-standing relationship between the Maximizing Adolescent Potentials Program (MAPS) and Fox Chapel Area School District. Funding provides support of three full-time behavioral health professionals that offer technical assistance and support to faculty, screening and support of students upon request, while also collaborating and supporting their families to ensure academic, emotional, and social success.
Principal Investigator: Jennifer Ely
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Maximizing Adolescent Potentials Program (MAPS)
Agency Name: Allegheny County
Award Dates: 7/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $310,640
Maximizing Adolescent Potentials Program received funding from the Allegheny County Office of Behavioral Health to provide health promotion programming for FY 2022-2023
MAPS was awarded $310,640.00 to provide evidence-based and effective Drug & Alcohol prevention programming in the Pittsburgh Public, North Allegheny, Hampton Township, Highlands, and Chartiers Valley Schools and community organizations.
Principal Investigator: Jennifer Ely
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Oakland Catholic
Agency Name: Oakland Catholic High School
Award Dates: 8/15/23 – 6/15/24
Amount: $8,000
MAPS earned an $8,000 grant intended to support the advancement of the student support services at Oakland Catholic High School. The goal of this grant is to identify areas of improvement within their Student Assistance Program while offering screening and recommendation services to identified students.
Principal Investigator: Jennifer Ely
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Franklin Regional
Agency Name: Franklin Regional School District
Award Dates: 7/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $222,000
Maximizing Adolescent Potentials (MAPS) has secured a grant with Franklin Regional School District for the 2022-23 school year in its effort to enhance student support services. Our role with the district will entail the provision of 2 full-time social services liaisons with one assigned to the primary and intermediate and the other working at the middle and high schools to identify behavioral health needs in each building and help develop a comprehensive and specialized mental health support program to meet the complex needs of today’s schools.
Additionally, the district will work directly with the Program Director in the evaluation of their current building resources to identify overlap and create a streamlined and effective school-wide mental health support system.
Principal Investigator: Rhonda Hall
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: Partnerships for Family Support
Agency Name: Allegheny County Department of Human Services
Award Dates: 7/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $256,290
The program seeks to enhance quality in a primary prevention system for families with young children in Allegheny County. The approach of this system is the implementation of the family support principles, which highlight community governed, designed, and improved services and activities. Cornerstones of the prevention system are the promotion of evidence-based home visiting and the use of the Protective Factors framework to strengthen families and improve the outcomes for young children.
Principal Investigator: Tracy Larson
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: HC – PPS HS
Agency Name: Pittsburgh Public Schools
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $264,541
The HealthyCHILD team will apply the “lessons learned” from the Mellon-funded and evidence-based HealthyInfants model of tiered supports and the 5 innovations focusing on caregiver-child interactions (both child care provider and parent); this “morphing” of the HealthyInfants model elements into the PPS HS Program will enhance the quality of care provided via a prevention-to-intervention model of graduated supports which promotes the use of developmentally-appropriate practices centering on positive caregiver-infant/toddler attachment relationships.
Principal Investigator: Tracy Larson
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: HI – PPS EHS
Agency Name: Pittsburgh Public Schools
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $47,966
The HealthyCHILD team will apply the “lessons learned” from the Mellon-funded and evidence-based HealthyInfants model of tiered supports and the 5 innovations focusing on caregiver-child interactions (both child care provider and parent); this “morphing” of the HealthyInfants model elements into the PPS EHS Program will enhance the quality of care provided via a prevention-to-intervention model of graduated supports which promotes the use of developmentally-appropriate practices centering on positive caregiver-infant/toddler attachment relationships. Birth – 3 programming in District classrooms.
Principal Investigator: Tracy Larson
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: HI – PPS EHS-CCP
Agency Name: Pittsburgh Public Schools
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 7/31/24
Amount: $33,310
The HealthyCHILD team will apply the “lessons learned” from the Mellon-funded and evidence-based HealthyInfants model of tiered supports and the 5 innovations focusing on caregiver-child interactions (both child care provider and parent); this “morphing” of the HealthyInfants model elements into the EHS-Child Care Partnership will enhance the quality of care provided via a prevention-to-intervention model of graduated supports which promotes the use of developmentally-appropriate practices centering on positive caregiver-infant/toddler attachment relationships.
Principal Investigator: Tracy Larson
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: HI – PPS EHS-CCP EXP
Agency Name: Pittsburgh Public Schools
Award Dates: 3/1/23 – 2/29/24
Amount: $24,387
The HealthyCHILD team will apply the “lessons learned” from the Mellon-funded and evidence-based HealthyInfants model of tiered supports and the 5 innovations focusing on caregiver-child interactions (both child care provider and parent); this “morphing” of the HealthyInfants model elements into the EHS-Child Care Partnership will enhance the quality of care provided via a prevention-to-intervention model of graduated supports which promotes the use of developmentally-appropriate practices centering on positive caregiver-infant/toddler attachment relationships.
HealthyCHILD will serve 7 additional children through this funding.
Principal Investigator: Heather McCambly
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: Reversing the Research Lens: Analyzing Turns Toward Racial Equity at IES and NSF
Agency Name: National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation
Award Dates: 9/1/22 – 8/31/23
Amount: $70,000
Recent studies have spotlighted the persistently racialized funding decisions of agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (NSF). These inequities have critical implications for the study of racialization in higher education as grant funds are used as key indicators of institutional prestige; to legitimize particular methodological, epistemic, and political traditions in research; and to shape participation in the academy via influence over tenure outcomes and graduate student training. Prior work also demonstrates that government policies that favor research infrastructures and methodologies concentrated at elite, white-serving institutions provide a race-evasive mechanism for the racialized distribution of resources in educational research.
This project takes up grantmaking as a hidden yet pervasive mechanism of racialization at two agencies that play critical roles in educational research and reform: the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) and the NSF’s Education and Human Resources Directorate (NSF-EHDR). In doing so, this project seeks to offer critiques of education-focused grantmaking generative to catalyzing shifts toward racial equity and epistemic expansion in the academy and educational policy more broadly.
Principal Investigator: Shannon Wanless
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: Building an SEL ecosystem to support Project SEEKS Schools
Agency Name: Allegheny Intermediate Unit
Award Dates: 6/15/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $1,000,000
The goal of this project is to build an Allegheny County SEL ecosystem in each of 10 neighborhoods where public schools are getting additional SEEKS resources to enhance SEL. Our project will wrap supports around the schools by working with the early childhood programs, family centers, and higher education institutions. We will facilitate SEL Communities of Practice (6 sessions each) specifically designed for 8 different roles: Families, Family Center Staff, K-12 School Leaders, Early Childhood Educators, Community Providers, Higher Education Faculty & Staff, Early Childhood Classrooms, and K-3 Educators. These sessions will all be grounded in a unified definition of SEL that centers equity and 6 High-Quality, Racially-Affirming Picture Books that were chosen specifically to create adult SEL learning experiences. Finally, all of these people will come together so that the SEL Champions in the neighborhood meet each other, learn together, share resources, and see each other as partners. To bring everyone together for SEL, 3 of the Community of Practice Sessions will be held collectively, with a focus on building a strong and sustainable community that can work together for SEL for many years.
Principal Investigator: Tom Ralston
Department: Teaching, Learning and Leading
Project Title: Project SEEKS SEL
Agency Name: Allegheny Intermediate Unit
Award Dates: 7/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $365,000
The University of Pittsburgh School of Education Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leading will be participated in the Project SEEKS (Supporting Expansion and Enhancement of K-12 School-Based Social-Emotional Supports) grant. The grant aims to discuss, explore and implement strategies that positively impact social-emotional learning for students in K-12 education.
The grant will fund special projects for the 2023-2024 school year with the goal of increasing the educator pipeline with individuals prepared to support a culture of social-emotional health in schools and classrooms, increasing faculty understanding and expertise in social-emotional learning, and to integrate social-emotional programming and learning experiences within the educator certificate courses and programs.
Principal Investigator: Sally Sherman
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Examination of a remote-delivered weight loss and yoga intervention for adults with overweight and obesity
Agency Name: NIH
Award Dates: 9/1/23 – 8/31/28
Amount: $198,702 (Pitt portion)
The Pathway to Achieving Total Health & Weight Loss (PATH Trial) is funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the National Institutes of Health and examines a remote-based yoga intervention for improving long-term weight loss. This five-year trial studies the added effect of a yoga intervention to an Internet-delivered weight loss program on weight loss, dietary lapses, and potential lapse triggers, and examines the mechanisms through which yoga impacts weight. Sally Sherman, Ph.D., (Health and Human Development) is a co-investigator in collaboration with Jessica Unick, Ph.D. (school of education alum) at the Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center at Brown University.
Principal Investigator: Cassie Quigley (PI), Tinukwa Boulder (Co-PI), Amanda Godley (Co-PI)
Department: Teaching, Learning and Leading
Project Title: Strength Across Schools (SAS) Partnership 2.0: A Regional Collaboration to Teach Justice-Focused Computational Thinking and Computer Science in Middle School ELA Classrooms
Agency Name: NSF
Award Dates: 9/1/23 – 8/31/26
Amount: $999,801
This CSforAll PreK-8, Medium RPP Project aims to expand on an existing initiative focused on integrating Computational Thinking (CT) and Computer Science (CS) instruction into middle school English Language Arts (ELA). By adding additional school districts and educational organizations, this project aims to collaboratively develop a curriculum that integrates CT/CS and ELA learning goals with a focus on justice. The project also aims to provide multiple forms of ELA teacher support for successfully implementing the CT/CS curriculum in the classroom, including professional development opportunities and classroom-based teacher supports. The project will investigate how these supports help ELA teachers effectively implement the curriculum and how the curriculum shapes the CT/CS knowledge, computational identities, and digital empowerment of underrepresented students in CS, specifically female, Black, and Latinx students. By addressing the critical time in middle school when students tend to opt out of STEM experiences, particularly in CS education, this project seeks to overcome challenges related to underfunding, teacher shortages, and limited access to professional development in partner districts and many other school districts across the country. Integrating CT/CS into ELA instruction offers a promising solution, as CT skills align with ELA standards, digital literacy is part of the ELA curriculum, and the humanities focus of ELA magnifies the human side of CT/CS, including issues of bias, social justice, and agency.
Principal Investigator: Cassie Quigley (Co-PI), Vaughn Cooper, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (PI)
Department: Teaching, Learning and Leading
Project Title: EvolvingSTEM: authentic classroom research curriculum to enhance inclusion and agency in modern life science
Agency Name: NIH
Award Dates: 4/1/23 – 3/31/28
Amount: $167,560 (SOE subaccount) $1,341,470 (Overall)
Authentic research experiences are known to support student learning by demystifying complex scientific concepts and building student confidence, scientific literacy, and motivation to consider careers in STEM, yet such experiences remain underutilized in high school life science courses and, if available at all, are often reserved for upper-level classes (e.g., Advanced Placement), which are less likely to serve students who come from groups that remain underrepresented in STEM fields, including women, students of color, and economically disadvantaged students. These educational disparities contribute to the persistent lack of diversity in the biomedical workforce, even though diversity enhances scientific research by fostering innovation and creative problem-solving. To transform classroom teaching practices to include active learning, including engaging in research activities, and include culturally relevant content (e.g., the social impacts of STEM research on human welfare, incorporating diverse role models) to achieve STEM equity by encouraging underrepresented students to pursue careers in these fields, while simultaneously transforming the field. Specifically, we are testing a program called, EvolvingSTEM, which uses evolution-in-action to engage students in authentic laboratory experiences that examine life science topics and inspires enduring interest in science.
Principal Investigator: Shannon Wanless
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: Hershey Schools Evaluation
Agency Name: Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning
Award Dates: 6/15/23 – 6/15/25
Amount: $1,233,397 (additional funding)
The Office of Child Development’s Evaluation & Research Team is designing and implementing continuous quality improvement processes for all Catherine Hershey Preschools in Pennsylvania. These schools are a new comprehensive, high-quality model of education, health & social services, community impact, and workforce development. Having an embedded continuous quality improvement process will ensure that this model evolves and improves over time. CHS staff are learning to design their own questions, try new strategies with the support of on-site coaches, use data to assess how their strategies are working, and reflect on how to move forward. This continuous quality improvement process will be shared with stakeholders in quarterly reflection meetings, and will contribute to the program’s child, family, and community goals. The Office of Child Development is excited to be a partner with CHS and they are working together to ensure positive statewide impact on the PA early education system.
Principal Investigator: Sean Kelly
Department: Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy
Project Title: FW-HTF-RL: Collaborative Research: Building Teachers of the Future via AI-enabled Agnostic Feedback for Job-Embedded Learning
Agency Name: National Science Foundation
Award Dates: 11/1/23 – 10/31/27
Amount: $1,999,326
With new funding through NSF’s Future of Work program, Sean Kelly (Department of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy) will partner with the University of Colorado-Boulder and TeachFX to provide automated, job-embedded, individualized feedback to teachers. Grounded in technologies on the AI frontier which provide objective, fine-grained, feedback, the project will test agnostic, or non-evaluative approaches to professional feedback. Working with teachers, Kelly and his team will co-design and refine AI-enabled agnostic feedback visualizations and practices. They will then develop state-of-the-art speech and language processing technologies that provide automated feedback on high-leverage classroom discourse practices. Finally, they will test the AI-enabled agnostic theory of professional learning in a randomized control trial contrasting automated agnostic—with evaluative—feedback on teacher learning, empowerment, and student achievement. Do technologically-driven agnostic feedback systems, which offer choice, withhold judgement, make room for locally-compensatory practices, and promote a greater locus of control, offer the richest opportunities for on-the-job feedback in the professions? If so, this research will create a blueprint for effective and efficient professional observation and feedback, and working systems to implement that feedback, driving the next generation of educational improvement.
Principal Investigator: Chris Dunkerley
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: Early Head Start 23-24
Agency Name: Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families
Award Dates: 9/29/23 – 9/28/24
Amount: $5,085,979
The Office of Child Development’s Family Foundations Early Head Start program received a new five-year grant project. Since 1995, FF/EHS has been providing services to neighborhoods within Allegheny County serving 310 children and their families (including pregnant women) through a home-based model.
FF/EHS’s expertise in Infant Mental Health and long history of reaching families who can’t be reached through other models makes this program ideally suited to deliver quality EHS services. Highly trained staff, who reflect the cultural diversity of the communities they serve, work with parents and infants and toddlers in their care to enhance the development of attachments and positive interactions between parents and children. The Family Foundation’s Early Head Start program is based on the following principles:
Additionally, the program’s continuous program improvement plan includes an annual quality improvement study and data analysis in collaboration with Dr. Thistle Elias and the School of Public Health.
Principal Investigator: Sharon Ross/JP Marrero-Rivera
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Prenatal and child physical activity and cognitive attributes: A Pregnancy 24/7 Offspring Study Diversity Supplement
Agency Name: National Institutes for Health
Award Dates: 9/1/23 – 8/31/25
Amount: $164,614
The aim of this NIH/NHLBI Diversity Supplement is to investigate how both prenatal physical activity across pregnancy trimesters and early childhood physical activity influence child development during the first two years of life. This study is a supplement to the NHLBI-funded Pregnancy 24/7 Offspring Study (R01HL164662) with Dr. Sharon Ross as a Co-Investigator and Pittsburgh site PI and Dr. Kara Whitaker (University of Iowa) and Dr. Bethany Gibbs (West Virginia University) as MPIs. This supplement includes an authentic and age-appropriate assessment of child development to evaluate the child’s development in domains of motor, language, social, and cognitive skills at 24-months from the perspective of the child’s caregiver(s). The results of this study could inform future interventions to test the impact of increasing physical activity during pregnancy and/or among younger children on neurocognitive outcomes in early childhood.
Principal Investigator: Esohe Osai
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Justice Scholars Institute RISE Program for Pittsburgh Public School Students
Agency Name: Grable Foundation
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 5/30/24
Amount: $5,000
Funding from the Grable Foundation supported the Justice Scholars Institute RISE Summer College Access Program, which allowed rising seniors at Pittsburgh Milliones, Perry, and Westinghouse to learn about the college application process, selecting the right fit college, college life, financial aid, FAFSA, scholarships, and much more. RISE was a paid 4-day program in August that invited students to explore and think through the college process as they prepared to embark upon their senior year of high school. Multiple partners were included in this engagement, including Catapult Pittsburgh, an economic justice program that provides financial literacy programming. Funds from the award allowed us to pay students and compensate partners for their involvement.
Principal Investigator: Tessa McCarthy (Co-PI), Robert Wall Emerson, Western Michigan (PI)
Department: Teaching Learning and Leading
Project Title: Orientation and Mobility: Facilitating Learning and Improvement of Proprioception (OMFLIP)
Agency Name: U.S. Department of Education
Award Dates: 10/1/23 – 9/30/28
Amount: $327,505 (Pitt portion), $1,247,667 (Overall)
Project FLIP (Facilitating Lasting Improvements in Proprioception) is a personnel preparation grant sponsored by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). This project will fund tuition support for 15 master’s students to become orientation and mobility specialists, professionals who teach travel and cane skills to individuals who are visually impaired. In addition to funding students, the project will provide for the development of coursework in an innovative new method to increase the proprioceptive skills of students who are visually impaired. This project is a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh, Western Michigan University, and Portland State University.
Principal Investigator: Tracy Larson
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: HI – PPS EHS-CCP EXP
Agency Name: Allegheny Intermediate Unit 3
Award Dates: 8/29/23 – 8/28/25
Amount: $803,278
This project will explore what is working well within organizations who are using high quality practices to include and promote family leadership at all levels and how to promote those practices more broadly. Steps will include:
HealthyCHILD will conduct CLASS assessments on all AIU classrooms, provide monthly virtual PLCs/ reflective practice sessions with 7 groups of educators, and provide practice-based coaching (on-site and virtual) to 7 identified teachers/classrooms. HC will visit the identified classrooms to build relationships and collaborate with educators to identify goals, and develop, and monitor plans. HC will provide education, coaching, and performative feedback in these classrooms. HC will demonstrate/model tiered SEL strategies for educators, trouble-shoot challenging behaviors, reach out to families, with educators, when needed, and link children and families to extra services when needed.
Principal Investigator: Tracy Larson
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: HI – AIU3 EHS
Agency Name: Allegheny Intermediate Unit 3
Award Dates: 11/1/23 – 10/31/24
Amount: $70,854
HealthyInfants will operate in a collaborative process with AIU EHS staff using general modes of support to promote the development of healthy social-emotional competencies and self-regulatory skills for infants and toddlers birth to 3, and the use of effective strategies for learning and development by teachers, home visitors and parents/caregivers.
Principal Investigator: Esohe Osai
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Supporting Deep Learning and Equity in College Access Preparation through the JSI Teacher Collective
Agency Name: Grable Foundation
Award Dates: 12/1/23 – 11/30/25
Amount: $70,000
Funding from the Grable Foundation supported the Justice Scholars Institute RISE Summer College Access Program, which allowed rising seniors at Pittsburgh Milliones, Perry, and Westinghouse to learn about the college application process, selecting the right fit college, college life, financial aid, FAFSA, scholarships, and much more. RISE was a paid 4-day program in August that invited students to explore and think through the college process as they prepared to embark upon their senior year of high school. Multiple partners were included in this engagement, including Catapult Pittsburgh, an economic justice program that provides financial literacy programming. Funds from the award allowed us to pay students and compensate partners for their involvement.
Principal Investigator: Eboni Zamani-Gallaher
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: REACH Collaborative (REACH Deeper)
Agency Name: Lumina Foundation
Award Dates: 6/8/23 – 12/27/24
Amount: $698,500
Principal Investigator: Keith Trahan
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: GenCyber@Pitt Teachers Preparedness Program
Agency Name: National Security Agency
Award Dates: 8/29/23 – 8/28/24
Amount: $3,159
Principal Investigator: Elon Dancy
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: It Takes a Village (Plus AI): Doubling Math Learning by Optimizing Tutoring from Training to Practice
Agency Name: Schmidt Family Foundation
Award Dates: 10/1/23 – 9/30/24
Amount: $290,179
Principal Investigator: Mariko Cavey
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: National Partnership for Student Success (JHU EGC)
Agency Name: Ballmer Group
Award Dates: 8/28/23 – 4/27/24
Amount: $83,516
Mariko Yoshisato Cavey is the PI/Director of Higher Education Partnerships for the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and Johns Hopkins University. The NPSS works to increase the number of people serving in high-impact P-12 student support roles in communities across the country, to address immediate pandemic recovery needs in education, build the future educator pipeline, and support students’ holistic thriving through evidence-based, locally-determined solutions. Mariko interacts with all levels of federal, state, district, school, and higher education leaders, as well as non-profits, foundations, and other groups to support the implementation of all program initiatives associated with the NPSS Support Hub. She specializes in providing guidance to colleges and universities partnering with districts and nonprofits to implement P-12 support efforts. She also leads a national coalition of institutions answering the U.S. Department of Education’s call for colleges and universities to recruit, train, and place students in P-12 roles, through Federal Work-Study employment and other pathways to community service. Mariko will hire a Research Assistant who will contribute to cross-sector collaborations and capacity-building efforts with higher education, district, nonprofit, and state leaders answering this national call to action.
Principal Investigator: Eboni Zamani-Gallaher
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: Transformation Enablers Pilot – Pathways Providers – Supplement
Agency Name: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 7/31/24
Amount: $153,196
The purpose of this project is to fund the integration of the Community College Research, Praxis and Leadership (CCRPL@Pitt) efforts through the Office of the Associate Dean for Equity, Justice and Strategic Partnerships as a new transformation enabler service provider in the BMGF Service, Design and Delivery (SD&D) ecosystem. This project will align with and reinforce established objectives for the Align Key Partners portfolio outcomes (e.g., optimizing efficiency and effectiveness of quality service requests and deliveries to enable service at scale made from established solutions and capacities providers to enable continuous improvement). Core CCRPL@Pitt staff will participate in a networked-improvement community (NIC) comprised of all capacities and Pathways providers, as well as 1:1 consultation and planning with SOVA Solutions, contributions to a shared online space for collaboration following foundational topics such as understanding equity principles, integrated framework dependencies, broader marketplace collaborations etc. Hence, CCRPL@Pitt service offerings and integration of those offerings into the SD&D ecosystem. Support from this grant will be used to guide and leverage content expertise in offering technical assistance and coaching to community college stakeholders.
Principal Investigator: Sirry Alang
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Improving quality and equity of opioid use disorder treatment using a multi-state Medicaid research network
Agency Name: National Institutes of Health
Award Dates: 9/30/23 – 8/31/28
Amount: $212,888
The goal is to improve the quality and equity of opioid use disorder treatment services. We will develop and test efficient and sustainable measures to access the quality of services. These measures will center health equity, incorporate patient experiences, and guide clinic-level quality improvement initiatives and state Medicaid agency decisions.
Principal Investigator: Xu Qin
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: CAREER: Complex Causal Moderated Mediation Analysis in Multisite Randomized Trials: Uncovering the Black Box Underlying the Impact of Educational Interventions on Math Performance
Agency Name: National Science Foundation
Award Dates: 6/1/24 – 5/31/29
Amount: $842,512
An intervention may generate heterogeneous impacts due to natural variations in participant characteristics, context, and local implementation. Important research questions include whether the intervention impact is generalizable across individuals and contexts, for whom and under what contexts the intervention is effective, and why. To advance this line of research, this project will develop methods to assess (1) how the total impact of an intervention is mediated by one mediator or multiple concurrent or sequential mediators and (2) how the mechanisms vary by individual and contextual factors. The findings may help education practitioners improve and tailor intervention designs and implementations for different individuals and contexts and thus enhance educational equity. This project will also develop an R package with a web-based graphical interface that allows users to easily specify models by drawing path diagrams. The methods will be applied to the National Study of Learning Mindsets and Head Start Impact Study to investigate the mediation mechanisms underlying the impact of educational interventions on math performance and their heterogeneity. In addition to informing policy and practice for improving math and STEM education, the analyses will illustrate the implementations of the proposed methods and inform simulation studies and R package development.
Principal Investigator: April Chambers (Co-PI), Daniel Timco, IntelliSafe Analytics LLC (PI)
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: SBIR Phase I: Comprehensive, Human-Centered Safety System Using Physiological and Behavioral Sensing to Predict and Prevent Workplace Accidents
Agency Name: National Science Foundation
Award Dates: 12/1/23 – 5/31/24
Amount: $59,576 (Pitt portion), $273,369 (Overall)
Slips, trips, and falls are a major source of injury and death in the workplace. Monitoring and reporting of accidents and near-miss injuries in the workplace are a current challenge and typically under-reported. Wearable sensors may provide useful information to detect a slip, trip or fall event in the workplace. The purpose of this study is to record the body’s response to slips and trips. The long-term goal of this research is to develop a novel wearable device to monitor the individual worker and assess risk of slips or trips, slip or trip events and near-misses. Since every human is unique and may react differently to hazards based on their physical and mental predispositions, we anticipate unique reactions that can be used to identify user specific health parameters.
Principal Investigator: Jennifer Ely
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Yough
Agency Name: Yough School District
Award Dates: 2/1/24 – 6/30/25
Amount: $112,500
Maximizing All Potentials Program was awarded an 18 month contract with Yough School district. Specifically, $112,500.00 was awarded to support a Behavioral Health Liaison intended to fill gaps in student support services and behavioral health provision district wide.
The program will include: parent/family engagement, faculty and staff consultation and training, support and intervention among identified students with MTSS/PBIS framework, transition support of students in or going to out-of-school placement, threats assessments, participation in hearings on behalf of students, and technical assistance throughout the year in the development and implementation of a customized prevention/intervention program to meet the needs of Yough School District.
Principal Investigator: Sirry Alang (Co-PI), Jennifer Ware – Drexel University (PI)
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Illuminating and Addressing Structural Racism in the Healthcare Industry: Building the Field from the Ground Up
Agency Name: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Award Dates: 3/31/24 – 2/28/27
Amount: $387,410 (Pitt portion), $6,200,000 (Overall)
The grant aims to address deep-rooted structural racism within the healthcare industry and advance equity and justice in healthcare systems. Specifically, it will cultivate a diverse national network of scholars, community members, organizers and activists, and practitioners engaged in antiracism efforts within the healthcare industry and other industries that reinforce racism in health care to identify potential levers for healing and transformation. The project will use systems science and organizing tools that build power and agency towards accountability and policy transformation. Translation and dissemination of project learnings to key audiences will occur through collaborative, multimedia narrative strategies.
Principal Investigator: Caitlin Spear
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: Lowell/LLD Culturally Informed Instruction PLC
Agency Name: Lowell Public Schools
Award Dates: 11/15/23 – 10/31/24
Amount: $20,000
The Office of Child Development Literacy and Learning Division is partnering with Lowell Public School (Lowell, MA) to develop and deliver a multi-part training program focused on using picture books to deliver culturally informed instruction. This includes ongoing small group communities of practice, cross-district training, and the development of recommended book lists, as well as guides and resources to support educators in effectively using these books in their classrooms.
Principal Investigator: Amanda Cross
Department: Office of Child Development
Project Title: Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Evaluation
Agency Name: Tuscarora Intermediate Unit 11
Award Dates: 10/15/23 – 10/14/24
Amount: $87,000
The University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development Evaluation and Research Team will serve as the independent evaluator of Tuscarora Intermediate Unit (TIU) Early Childhood Education (ECE) ECE Health and Nutrition Promotion programs. The evaluation will integrate quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses to evaluate four of TIU’s health and nutrition programs for ECE providers.
Principal Investigator: Sean Kelly
Department: Educational Foundations, Organization, and Policy
Project Title: Changing Value Dimensions in Education? Evidence from School of Education Job Posting
Agency Name: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)
Award Dates: 4/1/24 – 1/31/25
Amount: $22,500
To help inform understanding of compelled speech on college campuses, recent scholarship has begun analyzing higher education job postings for signals about the diversity of viewpoints sought by hiring institutions. Yet, to date, this research does not fully capture the range of values in academic scholarship and teaching, and thus, lacks a frame of reference for understanding, for example, the hegemony of DEI values hypothesized by some researchers. Do job postings demonstrate a pre-occupation with specific values, and if so, at the expense of other values? And has the value emphasis changed in recent years? Other important values have historically been prioritized in American education, including, in one typology: quality, efficiency, equity, and choice. In this project we employ a text-as-data approach to inductively and deductively analyze the values and themes in education job postings. In doing so, we build on existing literature that has studied the presence of one particular value, like DEI, in job postings, and instead examine the full range of values. Without this, we lack a frame of reference for interpreting the observed prevalence of diversity values.
Principal Investigator: Sirry Alang (Co-PI), Julie Donohue – Health Policy & Management (Pitt) (PI)
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Medicaid Research Support for Allegheny County
Agency Name: Allegheny County Department of Human Services
Award Dates: 9/1/23 – 6/30/24
Amount: $13,855 (Pitt portion), $2,554,010 (Overall)
Given persistent racial inequities in rates of medication treatment for opioid use disorders, the project will explore and identity drivers of these iniquities to inform interventions.
Principal Investigator: Heather Bachman
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Strengthening SEL via Family/Educator Engagement
Agency Name: Birmingham Foundation
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 5/31/24
Amount: $3,780
This project involves a community-based collaboration with Dr. Bachman and WQED education staff, PPS early childhood education coordinators, and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to support pre-k students’ socioemotional learning (SEL). The PPS pre-k program has adopted a new curriculum that more heavily focuses on SES skills, and community partners are supporting this work by offering additional SEL materials and resources to families and teachers from 8 PPS pre-k classrooms. Families of children who will begin kindergarten in fall 2024 will also receive additional materials to support early learning over the summer months when the pre-k program is closed. Data collected by the Pitt team will demonstrate proof-of-concept to regional funders in the hopes of expanding this community ecosystem approach to serve all PPS pre-k classrooms across the district.
Principal Investigator: Heather Bachman
Department: Health and Human Development
Project Title: Improving Pre-K Math Literacy
Agency Name: RK Mellon Foundation
Award Dates: 8/1/23 – 8/1/25
Amount: $22,593
This project involves a community-based collaboration with Dr. Bachman and WQED education staff, AIU/Head Start teachers, McKeesport district pre-k teachers, and a local library to support preschool students’ early math learning. This community ecosystem approach offers additional math materials and resources to families and teachers from Head Start and pre-k classrooms, as well as resources and events at the library to support math learning and promote kindergarten registration. Families of children who will begin kindergarten in fall 2024 will also receive additional materials to support early learning over the summer months when the early childhood classrooms are closed. The Pitt team is gathering data from parents and teachers about the appropriateness and usefulness of these resources, and to identify potential additional areas of early learning to focus collaborative efforts on next year (2024-2025).
