Qing Cai is a doctoral student in the Social Research Methodology cluster at Berkeley School of Education. As a passionate researcher and reading advocate, her work focuses on bi-literacy, measurement and assessment of reading.
Qing’s research focuses on the challenges in reading comprehension, with a specific emphasis on decoding skills. She is interested in leveraging a range of methodologies, including Item Response Theory (IRT), Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM), Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT), and machine learning techniques, to understand how children develop decoding...
Note: I have retired from teaching and (with mixed emotions) no longer accept graduate students.
Bruce Fuller, a sociologist, delves into how institutions, large and small, try to lift the learning and growth of children. This prompts the question of how local actors, educators, and policy players can work smarter to lift organizations.
Recent work delves into:
The policy strategies deployed by the Trump Administration to erode the vitality of middle and low-income families. For example,...
Sarah Warshauer Freedman specializes in research on the development of written language, and the teaching and learning of writing, English, and history in educational settings. Her research focuses on US schools but also incoroporates cross-national comparisons to provide a broad understanding of educational practices and their effects. Professor Freedman is a strong advocate for bridging research and practice, often collaborating with teachers and practitioner-researchers in her studies.
A significant dimension of Professor Freedman's work explores societal divisions, conflict, and...
Maggie Chan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to this role, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Utah State University from 2023 to 2025. She earned her Ph.D. in Combined Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023 and completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Hawai‘i Psychology Internship Consortium. She is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist.
Dr. Chan’s research focuses on advancing equity in education by studying...
Michelle D. Young, Ph.D., is the Dean of the Berkeley School of Education. Throughout her career, she has developed and sustained a reputation as an innovative, civic-minded, ethical leader with a strong commitment to diversity and social justice. Young has served in a variety of leadership positions in higher education, the nonprofit sector and for the US government, including almost 20 years as executive director of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), an international consortium of more than 100 research institutions with master’s and doctoral level programs in...
Tolani Britton uses quasi-experimental methods to explore the impact of policies on students’ transition from secondary school to higher education, as well as access and retention in higher education. Recent work explores whether the disproportionate increase in incarceration of Black males for drug possessions and manufacture increased gaps in college enrollment rates by race and gender over two time periods- after the passage of the Anti-Drug Act from 1986 - 1993 and after the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act from 1995 - 2000.
Jose Eos Trinidad is Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the University of California Berkeley. He is a sociologist focused on the study of organizations outside schools and the study of schools as organizations. He received his Joint PhD in Sociology and Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago.
Research Bringing together the sociologies of organizations and education, his research interrogates education policy, civil society, and institutional change. He is author of...
Dr. Pardos is an Associate Professor of Education at UC Berkeley studying adaptive learning and AI. His current research focuses on knowledge representation and recommender systems approaches to increasing upward mobility in postsecondary education using behavioral and semantic data.
He earned his PhD in Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a dissertation on computational models of cognitive mastery. Funded by a National Science Foundation Fellowship (GK-12), he spent extensive time with K-12 educators and students working to integrate educational technology into...
Patricia Baquedano-López is Professor of Educational Linguistics at the Berkeley School of Education. Trained as a lingusitic anthropologist and as an applied linguist, she is a scholar with a long-standing interest in the language practices and education of racialized and minoritized students in schools. Her most recent projects address the dynamics of transnational Indigenous sovereignty, return migration, and education in the Maya diaspora Yucatan-California. Professor Baquedano-López is formally affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Linguistics. She...
Erin Murphy-Graham works in the field of comparative and international education. Her research focuses on three inter-related areas: 1) the process by which education can foster the empowerment of girls and women, and the theorization of what empowerment entails; 2) the role of education in changing how students relate to others, particularly in their intimate relationships and in building trust; 3) the rigorous evaluation of educational programs that have demonstrated potential to empower youth and adults in Latin America. She is currently engaged in a design-based research-practice...
