Leadership
The team leader of College Ambition Program and Crafting Engaging Science Environments, Barbara Schneider, is dedicated to bringing science education and career options to students traditionally underrepresented in the sciences.
Barbara Schneider
Barbara Schneider is the John A. Hannah University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education and the Department of Sociology. She uses a sociological lens to understand societal conditions and interpersonal interactions that create norms and values for enhancing human and social capital. Her research focuses on how the social contexts of schools and families influence the academic and social well-being of adolescents as they move into adulthood. In her career, Schneider has also played a significant role in the development of research methods for the real- time measurement of learning experiences. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and, most recently, was elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. In 2017, she received an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Helsinki. Schneider is the principal investigator of the College Ambition Program (CAP), a study that tests a model for promoting a STEM college-going culture in high schools that encourages adolescents to pursue STEM majors in college and in their careers. She is also the principal investigator of Crafting Engagement in Science Environments, an international high school study that tests the impact of Project Based Learning on student academic, social and emotional factors in science classes. Professor Schneider has published 15 books and more than 100 articles and reports on family, social contexts of schooling and sociology of knowledge.
Meet the team
Here at CAP and CESE we work together to bring innovative science learning to students across the United States, while encouraging students to improve their college and career self efficacy.
Kayla Bartz
Kayla Bartz is a doctoral student in the Measurement and Quantitative Methods program at Michigan State. Her research interest includes test development and studying the psychometric properties of varying assessments and surveys.
Lydia Bradford
Lydia Bradford is an advanced graduate student in Measurement and Quantitative Methods at Michigan State University College of Education. She graduated from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages and Global Health with a minor in Economics in 2017. Before starting her doctorate, Lydia was a high school chemistry and economics teacher which has led her to an interest in science education; however, her main research interest lies in statistical modeling, analysis, research design, mediation and moderation effects, and causal inference within the context of educational research. In the fall of 2019, Lydia began working on two separate science curriculum interventions, Crafting Engaging Science Environments and Multiple Literacies in Project Based Learning. In these projects, she has participated in data construction and data management as well as various statistical analysis of both the main treatment effects and other exploratory analysis and applications of machine learning for scoring teacher observations.
I-Chien Chen
I-Chien Chen received a Ph.D. in Sociology and worked as an assistant professor in the College of Education at the Michigan State University. Her research uses sociological lens to understand how social contexts, interpersonal relationships and intervention programs enhance students’ educational expectations, social emotional learning, college-going decisions, and career pathways into adulthood.
Her research centers on the ways to make educational opportunities, resources, and information accessible to students, particularly for those who are historically underrepresented in the educational system. She draws on social-psychological and sociocultural perspectives to understand learning opportunities and inequality by applying the quantitative method, causal inference, textual data analysis, and social network analysis as toolkits to understand education-related behavior of decision-making, collaborative learning, and career pathways.
Katie Ward
Katie Ward is a Ph.D. student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University. Her research interest is in the intersection of language, culture, and faith in culturally and linguistically diverse Catholic schools.
Claire Smith
Claire Smith is a junior undergraduate student studying Social Relations and Policy in the James Madison College at Michigan State University. She also has minors in Portuguese, Educational Studies, and Latin American and Carribean Studies. Her primary research interest is equitable higher education access.