Research Experience and Skills

Applied social research offers opportunities to address questions that arise from practice.  It is a chance to weave together our assumptions, designs and methods and seek answers for the mutual benefit of others.  My research reflects a desire to move beyond an individual focus and deeply examine the events, activities, and learning processes that co-occur in classrooms. My qualitative dissertation is the first step in identifying key variables of interest that bear further examination using both quantitative and qualitative methods for improving concept learning and conceptual language usage for preschool-age children who require aided AAC.

Current Research

principal investigator of 5-year inter-professional collaboration - implementation science project in partnership with urban school district - special education classrooms - classroom-based research - quantitative & qualitative approaches to Data Collection and cross-case Analysis. embedded case studies. research-to-practice and Practice-to-research.

Dissertation Research

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, Chapel Hill, NC

How Conceptual-Relational Words are Taught, Used, and Learned: A Cross-Case Analysis       

My dissertation addresses three problems in AAC practice relevant to vocabulary selection and use. First, vocabulary selected for emergent communicators is often insufficient in type and number of vocabulary items (Drager, Light, Speltz, Fallon, & Jeffries, 2003). Second, vocabulary selected may be insufficiently flexible for use across partners and contexts (Geist, Hatch, & Erickson, 2014). Third, children with complex communication needs (CCN) and developmental disabilities (DD) may enter preschool without access to, or knowledge of, essential conceptual relational words (CRWs) necessary for full participation in all learning contexts and many daily preschool interactions (Bracken & Crawford, 2010; Wilson, 2004).

This study explores, and seeks to understand, how three purposefully selected inclusive preschool teachers shift their communication and instructional style (Gillies, 2016; Reeve, 2006) between children with and without CCN during daily instruction that supports the learning of basic concepts. Simultaneously, this study explores if and how children with CCN and DD in these inclusive preschool classrooms demonstrate understanding, and use, of CRWs, as a subset of basic concepts (Boehm, 2014; Bracken & Crawford, 2010), with specific attention to the impact of aided AAC systems (e.g., graphic symbols with or without a speech generating device) when they are available.

• Prepared documents & obtained approval from Institutional Review Board to conduct study

• Recruited and consented-to-study 21 adults and 56 children for a total of 77 participants.

• Coordinated with site participants to collect consent forms, site demographics and data from individual education plans; scheduled teacher interviews

• Collected 12-weeks of participant observational data (field notes including teacher-student discourse, event narratives, and “thick” descriptions of participants-engaging-in-context) while immersed daily in four naturalistic preschool settings

• Captured evidence of experiential concept learning during independent & interactive activities via photos

• Conducted and transcribed 12 semi-structured interviews with four lead teachers

• Cleaned & expanded field notes daily including editing of photos and matching to text

• Completed initial coding for field notes and teacher interview transcriptions; initiated first pass of cross-case analysis

• Maintained daily log for audit trail

• Utilized both hand-coding techniques and computer applications to organization, conceptualize and visualize data

• Documented insights and understanding by creating memos throughout data collection and analysis

• Conducted a thematic and constant comparison analysis per case and across cases

Research Assistant to Karen Erickson, Ph.D.

Pre-Dissertation Research

UNC Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, Chapel Hill, NC

8-Month Intrinsic Qualitative Case Study

This study is embedded in larger mixed-methods study with Project Core Team under direction of Dr. Karen Erickson, Dr. Lori Geist, Dr. Penny Hatch & Dr. Claire Greer

• Utilized both hand-coding techniques and computer applications to organize, conceptualize and visualize data

• Organized and prepared research team case field notes, participant interviews and artifacts data for analysis

• Coded, analyzed and interpreted data in ATLAS.ti

• Created novel sentiment analysis of textual data using SAS

• Disseminated findings at national and international research conferences

Principal Investigator