The Reach of Research - 2015

Education in America is at a crossroads. Lehigh’s commitment to innovative research and focus on applying research to practice allow College of Education faculty to help shape education and mental-health policy across the nation.

Allentown, Pennsylvania 

In the “before” video, two teens sit and talk in a high school cafeteria, with a quiet, disengaged student with autism sitting between them. Despite the teens’ attempts to include the student with autism in their conversation, he remains rigid and detached, and after a few minutes, gets up from the table. 

In the “after” video, the same students sit together, but this time, they all take part in the conversation. The student with autism initiates conversation and asks questions about what his friends have said. The other students do a better job of involving the student with autism in their dialogue, and the three have a pleasant social interaction. 

What happened between the filming of the two videos is at the heart of Special Education Prof. Linda M. Bambara’s research into the communication skills of teens with autism. Together with Christine L. Cole, professor of School Psychology, Bambara and a dedicated team of doctoral student research assistants in Special Education and School Psychology are training students in the art of conversation. 

“Deficits in social-communication skills is one of the hallmark characteristics of individuals with autism,” Bambara says. “And in order to succeed in the world and form relationships with other people and have friends, you need to know how to have a conversation.” 

To help students with autism develop these important communication skills, Bambara, Cole and their team are doing dual training of both high school students with autism and fellow students without the disability. They are providing autistic students with tools to initiate conversations and to keep them going. They are also teaching students without the disability the strategies for first engaging students with autism, then prompting them to converse back. “Because, after all,” Bambara says, “conversation is not just about starting a conversation, but about topic maintenance skills—something many kids with autism lack.” 

The research is greatly needed, Bambara says. Few studies focused on social outcomes have been conducted in high schools. Most peer-mediated interventions have been for preschoolers and elementary students with autism, where interaction revolves around play. 

“In high school and beyond, what does interaction revolve around? Conversation,” she says. 

Preliminary data from three case studies show the training is working. Both the students with autism and their peers without the disability exhibited marked improvements in the quality of their interactions following the training. 

“Ultimately,” Bambara says, “by improving the communication skills of students with autism, we want to impact their quality of life.”

Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania

Eleven school administrators took part in an innovative study that aimed to better track how principals use their time—and how that might correlate with student achievement and student behavioral/emotional risk. 

The administrators were set up with Pebble Smartwatches, allowing Lehigh to randomly contact them daylong for a month to track how much time they spent on administration, instruction and other areas. Students were later screened for behavioral and emotional difficulties. 

The project was led by Bridget V. Dever, assistant professor of School Psychology; Craig Hochbein, assistant professor of Educational Leadership; and George P. White, Iacocca professor of Educational Leadership. 

“What we wanted to know,” says Dever, “was whether what principals were doing on a daily basis was really relating to student outcomes.” 

The data showed links between how principals spent time and student outcomes. Among early findings: When principals spent more time on administration, students reported better coping and social skills and fewer internalizing problems; when principals reported more time on non-school activities, students in those schools reported higher levels of behavioral and emotional difficulties. 

Following changes over time will help to pinpoint causation in these associations, Dever says. 

The on-going project also will look at whether there are any links between how well students perform on standardized tests and how principals spend their time.

Around the World

Rwanda

Three Lehigh students are helping the Agahozo- Shalom Youth Village to revise its monitoring and evaluation system. The village cares for youth orphaned during and after the 1994 genocide. The team, led by Alexander W. Wiseman, associate professor of Comparative and International Education, will visit with village leaders and evaluation specialists in late 2015 or early 2016.

China

COE’s Office of Global Online Graduate Degrees and Training partnered with Nanjia (Shanghai) Culture Communication Ltd. to provide development workshops for practicing counselors in Shanghai. Arnold Spokane, professor of Counseling Psychology, and doctoral student Ge Song conducted the workshops that emphasized therapeutic skills for working with mental health issues across cultures.

Lativa

Iveta Silova, associate professor of Comparative and International Education, is researching how early literacy textbooks "construct" children and childhood in post-socialist countries of Eastern/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Her research focuses on the late Soviet and post-Soviet textbooks published in Armenia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.

Cambodia

Led by Sothy Eng, professor of practice of Comparative and International Education, four students took part this summer in Caring for Cambodia, a non-governmental organization. Santi Martinez, Jeevan Jain- Cocks, Linda Nguyen and Shannon Cassidy worked on a number of initiatives in Cambodia, including a new database system for educators and an English curriculum for second-graders.

Germany

Six Lehigh students spent two weeks at the University of Tübingen as part of a cultural and academic exchange, participating in a seminar led by Alexander W. Wiseman, associate professor of Comparative and International Education. Many of the students are part of a collaborative research project that looks at how universal education has become increasingly “scientized.”

Czech Republic

Christine Novak, professor of practice in School Psychology, led students Morgan Coonrad, Jonathan Ross, Lauren DiNapoli and Tuan Pham in working with three non-governmental organizations on social inclusion projects, focusing on the Roma. Students interviewed Czech citizens about their experiences with discrimination, creating Voices of Prague for Equality on Facebook