Overview
Lehigh's College of Education leads in high-impact research that supports meaningful outcomes across the lifespan and advances technology to enhance learning and well-being. Our faculty are leading experts in their fields who generate knowledge that informs practice and policy for a better tomorrow.
We accomplish this mission by conducting research that is relevant and accessible to our stakeholders including school and mental health professionals, policy makers and families. We believe that research is critically important in informing and improving educational and mental health policy and practice. Thus, the community is our “laboratory” in that we conduct research in collaboration with our stakeholders to address critical issues that affect the daily lives of students, families, and adults. And our research involves data collection at the “point of performance”, i.e., in the real world settings and timeframes where behaviors of interest occur.
Although our college is relatively small in terms of faculty numbers, we are extraordinarily productive in the quantity, quality and breadth of our research and scholarship. This productivity is reflected by traditional academic metrics of publication rates, citations by other scholars and receipt of grant research funding. More importantly, our faculty, students and alumni produce work of lasting impact on educational and mental health practice in schools and communities as well as on policy development and implementation.
Our work covers a wide spectrum of issues that are important to the community such as examining the effects of interventions on the educational and psychological functioning of youth and adults with disabilities (e.g., autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, learning disorders); measuring children’s school readiness and academic skills over time; examining the origins of gender roles and their impact on the psychological status of individuals and communities; or assessing factors that improve the daily practice of school building principals.
Of particular note is our Center for Promoting Research to Practice that has produced dozens of studies that have improved school- and community-based services for individuals with educational and mental health disabilities.
Research Spotlight
-
Alvarenga Prepares for a Career in Community Research
Josselyn Alvarenga, a second-year doctoral student in the COE’s Counseling Psychology program, is passionate about supporting healthy child development in marginalized families. Her research looks at how culture shapes the ways in which young children learn to handle and show their emotions.
Focusing on Black and Latinx families, Alvarenga looks at how parents and caregivers respond to their child’s distress, the child’s feelings of closeness and security with their caregivers, and how the child manages stress. She hopes that her research and the research of others within the Hands and Hearts Together project where she works, will promote wide-scale changes that positively impact family relationships and behaviors in these communities. -
Laying the Foundation for Healthy Child Development
A strong bond between a young child and their caregiver plays an important role in laying the foundation for children’s future health and wellbeing. This bond, or attachment, can be measured as the level of connection and safety young children feel with their parent or caregiver. As the director of the CARE Lab at Lehigh, Susan Woodhouse and her team study caregiving attachment and how children learn to manage and express their emotions. They then share this information to help parents respond to their children’s needs.
-
COE Grad Students Present at 2025 Colloquium
What a great event! Thirty-three COE graduate students shared their high-impact research at the Inaugural College of Education Student Research Colloquium last Friday. Students from the Counseling Psychology, Educational Leadership, School Psychology, Special Education and Teaching, Learning and Technology programs participated in the Mountaintop campus poster session.
Thank you to everyone who came out to show their support. -
Your Support Makes a Difference
On March 25th and 26th, Giving Day + March Mania: Combined Challenge for Lehigh takes place. This 48-hour event impacts all areas of the student experience and challenges all members of the Lehigh family to demonstrate their support for the campus initiatives and causes they are most passionate about. Please visit the COE Giving Day + March Mania page to participate:
