Social Research Methodologies

Tolani Britton

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.

Prior to earning her...

Sarah W. Freedman

Sarah Warshauer Freedman studies the development of written language, as well as ways writing, English, and history are taught and learned in schools. Her research focuses on US schools but also includes cross-national comparisons. Besides studying writing development, she is has conducted research on societal divisions that lead to conflict and inequality. She has studied how adolescents on varied sides of societal divides develop as citizens and civic actors. Her work on societal divides has included studies of the role of education in reconstructing societies after genocide in Rwanda...

Michelle D. Young

Michelle D. Young, Ph.D., is the Dean of the Berkeley School of Education. A scholar of educational policy and leadership, Young has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles focused on how university programs, educational policies, and school leaders support exceptional experiences for students and educational professionals. She received the Edwin M. Bridges Award in 2018 for her scholarship on the quality and impact of educational leadership preparation. Her highly regarded work on Critical Policy Analysis in education has contributed to the development of new frameworks and...

Jose Eos Trinidad

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...

Zachary A. Pardos

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...

Bruce Fuller

Note: I have retired from teaching and (with mixed emotions) no longer accept new 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:

How schools in Los Angeles raised the achievement of students for two decades prior to the pandemic, reported in ...

Patricia Baquedano-López

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...

Qing Cai

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...

Erin Murphy-Graham

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...

Özge Hacıfazlıoğlu

Dr. Özge Hacıfazlıoğlu is currently an adjunct professor in the Leadership Programs at the Berkeley School of Education. She serves as a leader scholar on PLI and LEAD (EdD) programs as well as PhD program in School Psychology and contributes as one of the members of communities of practice at UC Berkeley School of Education. She has recently served as a visiting professor at Berkeley School of Education. Prior to joining the BSE, Dr. Hacıfazlıoğlu worked in various academic leadership and faculty positions for 20 years. She served as a professor and a vice rector at Hasan Kalyoncu...