“I learned so much, from issues related to disproportionality of students with disabilities in a particular school district, to what motivates students of color to pursue a Ph.D. in school psychology,” said José Luis Alvarado, Ph.D, dean of the Graduate School of Education, in his congratulatory address to the students. “We look forward to seeing your presentations at AERA, AEA, NASP, and all the professional organizations you belong to.”

The annual event started last year, thanks to an idea from a doctoral student. The retreat portion of the event featured speakers and workshops, where students learned how to prioritize their mental health and pursue a career with their doctoral degree. Later in the day, keynote speaker Shaun Woodly, Ph.D., an award-winning educator, professor, and consultant, spoke about the importance of relationships in their work, as well as self-care. He also talked about something deeply personal to him. 

“He shared his experience and mistakes he made as a new teacher—using fear in the classroom as a behavior management strategy and how his own upbringing impacted how he viewed student behavior. This led to speaking about … how culture impacts behaviors and our response to behaviors, which in turn impacts how we view and engage in research,” said Annie George-Puskar, Ph.D., assistant professor and chair of GSE’s doctoral planning committee. 

Improving Childhood Disability Services for People with Autism

At the end of the evening, students displayed their research posters and shared their findings with guests. 

Four doctoral students in the school psychology program interviewed young adults with autism about receiving childhood disability services. They found that the study participants felt like they were stigmatized and that services often felt more like a study hall, rather than individualized support in academic and social skills.

When services are created and research is done on interventions for the community, the autistic voice is often not included, said the team. 

“This is another way to get the autistic voice out there and into academic spaces where researchers and service providers can see this information,” said doctoral student Sam Mogilski, adding that all four group members have loved ones who are on the spectrum, and that their team will share their research at the annual American Psychological Association conference this August. 

Identifying What Students Want to Learn in Civics Education 

Robert Niewiadomski, a doctoral student in the innovation in curriculum and instruction program, presented his team’s research on civics education for middle school students. One of their major findings is that students want to see more critical reflections on current events, including the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. 

“Based on our research, we recommend that classrooms include students’ experiences, their interests and voices, current events, and things that students’ see on social media or mainstream media, and make connections to whatever content is being taught to them in history or social studies classes,” said Niewiadomski, adding that their research was accepted in the International Journal of Educational Reform and will soon be published. “We are going to live in a country shaped by this generation. We want to change our society for the better—not erode it.”

In a new study, Fordham Graduate School of Education (GSE) doctoral student Hannah Sugarman and GSE professor Eric C. Chen, Ph.D., detail how much harder it can be when you’re a teenager.

In “Transgender Students’ Navigation of Gender Identity and Relationships in High School: A Phenomenological Analysis,” Sugarman interviewed three adults between 18 and 23, about how they navigated their transgender identity through the context of their relationships and high school experiences. The study, which took place in 2016 and 2017, involved two women who’d transitioned from being men and one man who’d transitioned from being a woman. All attended high schools in the New York City metro area and transitioned after they’d graduated.

Sugarman and Chen utilized a phenomenological qualitative method, which focuses on understanding a relatively small group of individuals’ own subjective experience, through the prism of the researchers’ professional and personal views. That is, both the participant and the researcher engage in the collaborative process of constructing layers of meanings underlying the phenomenon through in-depth personal interviews.

“The interviewer may have some ideas about what it means to be a transgender individual, but it’s through the process of having a dialogue with the participant that they eventually understand what it means to be transgender, and what it means to negotiate that hidden identity with others,” Chen said.

The study revealed that participants were dealing with five notable issues: early inclinations of transgender identity; denial of gender identity; school-related barriers to self-acceptance; emotional support impacting resilience; and taking on a queer identity.

Chen, whose research focuses on marginalized members of society, said that for him, the last theme was the most intriguing. Participants first identified as either gay, lesbian, or bisexual before realizing that these new labels are not sufficient.

“Transgender individuals, at least based on these participants’ experiences, seem to have a three-stage process,” Chen said. “They seem to pick up different labels to describe their own gender identity, experiment with it, and then realize, again consciously or unconsciously, that it doesn’t fit with their own transgender identity.”

Other findings that emerged from the interviews point to changes that can be made at the high school level. For instance, all three said they understood when they were very young that their psychological identity did not match their biological one. Like many in the LGTBQ community, they initially responded to this revelation with avoidance and hostility.

School administrators and teachers were sources of further tension, through policies, such as single gender bathrooms, or through the language they used.

“One [participant]indicated that she would cut school, because her teacher kept referring to her as a man. It was a source of constant stress for her,” said Chen.

On a positive side, all three participants said they were able to find adults or peers during their high school years who they could reach out to for emotional support. Those people may not have been aware of the students’ transgender identity, but because they were encouraging and empathetic, students felt OK with reaching out for comfort and found it beneficial.

The paper will form the basis of Sugarman’s doctoral dissertation. She and Chen will present their findings at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting, which takes place April 13 to 17 in New York.

“I have seen the impact that educated, compassionate, and empathetic adults can make on a student’s life, and my goal is to raise and showcase the voices of transgender individuals so that school personnel will be further suited to be that source of support,” Sugarman said.

“My sincere hope is that my research will contribute to the existing literature on transgender adolescents, and that my presentation will perhaps spark some interest in future research and understanding of this vulnerable community.”

That’s the crux of research by Yi Ding, PhD, associate professor of school psychology in the Graduate School of Education.

Ding’s research focuses on strategies that teachers can use to help children who are struggling with math. She makes the case that memorization of basic math facts, such as multiplication tables, is key because it allows children to store information in their long-term memory, and frees up their working memory to tackle more complex problems. For example, adults don’t have to actively remember their own names or birthdays because those facts are readily available in their long-term memory, which works on auto-retrieve.

“If you have to decode every word you are reading, what happens? You don’t have reading comprehension at all because your working memory is occupied by saying each letter. Your attention can’t go to the who, the how, the where, and the what,” she said.

“Math facts are the same. We have to memorize or automatically retrieve all this mathematical vocabulary so kids have this kind of fluency. Then their brain–their working memory–frees up to understand more complicated problems.”

She said that a lot of progress has been made treating the memories of children with special needs in the last 30 years, thanks to new pharmaceutical treatments and behavioral therapy, paired with changes in family and environment. Improving a child’s long-term memory allows them to use working memory to tackle more challenging tasks.

“Behavioral therapy early on can change the connectivity of the brain. So when we change the environmental stimulation and we change the way we approach the kids, many of them learn new skills.”

Ding has detailed her research in two upcoming papers: “Involvement of Working Memory in Mental Multiplication in Chinese Elementary Students,“ and “Working Memory Load and Automaticity in Relation to Mental Multiplication, under review for publication in the Journal of Educational Research. For the studies, she and her co-authors recruited fourth and fifth graders of differing academic levels to complete a series of arithmetic problems.

The study found that even if a problem involves more steps, if it comes with automatic retrieval to students, they do better. When asked to complete a two-step equations that they do not have automatic retrieval, like(25×3)×4, students stumble more frequently compared to when they tackled three-step problems that they have automatic retrieval, like 25×10+25×2.

A common critique of the American education system is “we try to dig three hundred miles wide and only half a mile deep,” she said. When Ding moved from Beijing to Iowa, she said she was taken aback by the thickness of children’s textbooks, coupled with the multiple topics teachers must cover in a short period.

“Teachers are running around like crazy trying to cover one topic to another. But then we don’t have enough time reserved for practice, for rehearsal, to give kids the time to make sure we have developed fluency in this most basic stuff. Your memory needs time to practice,” she said.

One way to address this is with drills. Ding remembers hating drills when she was a student but now appreciates them because they helped her develop a basic math vocabulary in her long-term memory.

Ding is working with engineering teachers to identify and aid low-performing students. She said it’s common for low-achieving engineering students to exhibit slow processing speeds, which leads them to struggle to complete exams in a timely fashion. Most of time, the automatic retrieval of math/engineering facts is very weak in these students.

To make matters worse, Ding’s evidence shows they tend to pick just one strategy to solve all problems, which results from a “very weak strategy flexibility.” They probably just simply do not have a wide range of effective strategies banked in their long-term memory and are not proficient with “which strategy fits what problem situation”.

“Even if they find the right strategy, when you ask them to calculate, they calculate it wrong. When the execution is problematic as well, it’s almost a double deficit,” she said.

“When you have lots of strategies that are well learned and banked in your long-term memory, then you free up your working memory. If a task has steps 1 through 10, and you can automatically retrieve steps 1 through 5 from memory, then you have what you need to do steps 6-10.”

Alfonso, a professor of school psychology who came to GSE in 1994, has rejoined the Division of Psychological and Educational Services, where he will expand partnerships between the University and needy New York City schoolchildren.

“I miss being in the administration because there were different ways to effect change, but there are also opportunities to influence change through writing, advising and mentoring students, and partnering with different agencies,”
he said.

Alfonso said working as the associate dean gave him a unique perspective on GSE and the University in general. He relished the challenge of working with multiple constituencies, from faculty members to students and administrators.

During his tenure as associate dean, he taught one class each semester and pursued his research interests, which include assessment and treatment of preschoolers, psycho-educational assessment, life satisfaction and subjective well-being, professional training and stressful life events. This semester, he is teaching a preschool assessment class and an internship seminar for students.

GSE’s outreach programs are among his priorities, too. The school is in its 15th year of the Bronx Project, in which professors, psychologists and students provide psychoeducational services at least one day a week at five to eight Catholic elementary schools in the South Bronx and Harlem.

“We’ve garnered $1.4 million; we’ve served more than 2,000 students; and we’ve had close to 100 school psychology externs—students who are gaining practical experience working in these schools,” he said.

“My goal is to expand that project to more schools, provide more services and secure greater funding,” he added.

A similar project began last spring on Roosevelt Island, where 20 graduate students, under the supervision of GSE professors, conducted educational assessments of 146 students in two schools. The schools then submitted the data to the Department of Education as part of their individual educational plans.

Aside from assisting in partnerships outside the University, such as the Los Ninos Young Child Expo and Conference, Alfonso is hoping to increase collaboration within Fordham. An upcoming conference for Catholic school principals, which he is organizing with the Office of Catholic School Leadership, is one such example.

“There are a lot of groups out there that want to collaborate and do good things, especially in these difficult economic times when education is being hit left and right, and there are so many children who need services,” he said. “When we work together, we have a better shot at helping them.”

Collaboration is a theme that reverberates through Alfonso’s research. In papers including “Review of the Battelle Developmental Inventory: Second Edition” (Journal of Early Childhood and Infant Psychology, 2010) and books such as Essentials of Specific Learning Disability Identification (Wiley, 2011), Alfonso and colleagues help address the science/practice gap.

“My colleagues and I continue to write chapters and books on assessments, and how we can translate theory and empirical work into everyday practice based on sound evidence,” he said.

Unfortunately, Alfonso said the biggest impediment to school success for children is poverty, which has been increasing for some time.

“Beyond the shadow of a doubt, poverty is the No. 1 risk factor for kids in terms of education, job attainment and avoiding incarceration,” he said.

“Many of the kids we serve in the Catholic schools are living in poverty. Often, these children are considered lazy or not so smart, but clearly the problem is that they do not have basic resources. They’re getting off to a very bad start, and the data are clear that when you’re off to a bad start, if there’s no intervention, you flatline. But when you intervene early and intensely and you maintain it through the early grades, the trajectory changes, and those kids have a higher probability of success.”

Alfonso draws a parallel between early intervention and the green-energy movement, which didn’t begin to gain in popularity until it was clear that money could be made from it. Right now, there’s little money in childhood early intervention.

“There’s a great line by Chris Rock, who says, ‘There’s no money in the cure; there’s money in the medicine. But if you cure the disease, you don’t need medicine.’

“My calling has been to serve others, and while the method and the means of doing that has changed over time, the core has remained the same, which is helping the less fortunate become autonomous contributors to society,” he said.

“You’ve got to start as early as possible for that to happen. The most important investment the country can make is in its children.”