COLLEGE PARK, MD (April, 2014) Ph.D. student Emily Rosenzweig of the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate research fellowship. Supporting three years of research in STEM learning, this fellowship will help Rosenzweig further her inquiry into student motivation and self-regulated learning. She is conducting this work with the Motivation in Education Research Group (MERG), a COE lab headed by her advisor, Dr. Allan Wigfield.
"After college, I worked at a high school in Boston as a math tutor, doing a year of service called the Match Corps, and my experiences there are what made me start studying motivation," Rosenzweig recounts. "Tutoring taught me that it's not that students are 'smart' or 'dumb' at math and that's why they do well or poorly. It's more that factors like how well students think they will do, how hard they work, and how much they value math and science determine their success."
This tutoring experience led Rosenzweig to investigate different ways to make students more motivated for math and science in the classroom. The goal of the project she proposed to the NSF is to develop broad, easily implementable interventions that use a combination of diverse motivation-enhancing instructional practices to help motivate students to read STEM materials and texts. This project is developing from a larger intervention called concept-oriented reading instruction (CORI) that Dr. Wigfield, professor emeritus Dr. John Guthrie, and the MERG lab have been working on for several years. The CORI program is designed to foster reading engagement and comprehension through the teaching of reading strategies, teaching of scientific concepts and inquiry skills, and its explicit support of the development of students' intrinsic motivation to read."
Rosenzweig is not the first HDQM doctoral student to receive this prestigious NSF fellowship. Last year, Sonya Troller-Renfree, Laura Elenbaas, and Janessa Malin received funding to pursue their research in developmental psychology. And this year, Sara Haas was named in honorable mention by the NSF for her research proposal, also in developmental psychology.
Emily Rosenzweig is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. Besides her research with MERG, she also works with David Miele at Boston College on applying social psychology theories of motivation to explore achievement outcomes. She earned her B.A. in Cognitive Neuroscience and Education Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Click here to learn more about the CORI program.
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