Social Research Methodologies

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...

Jose Eos Trinidad

Jose Eos Trinidad is an Assistant Professor in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster of the University of California Berkeley School of Education. He is a sociologist focused on the study of organizations outside schools and the study of schools as organizations. Bringing together the sociologies of organizations and education, his research interrogates education policy, civil society, and institutional change. He received his Joint PhD in Sociology and Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago.

Research...

Patricia Baquedano-López

Patricia Baquedano-López is Professor of Educational Linguistics at the Berkeley School of Education. A scholar with a long-standing interest in the education of racialized and minoritized students in schools, a strand of her research focuses on Indigenous Latinx students and examines processes and practices of settler colonialism in education. 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...

Joshua Sussman

Joshua Sussman is a researcher at the Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center where he uses data-driven approaches to improve educational assessment, policy, and practice. He uses generalized latent variable modeling and hierarchical modeling in quantitative studies that aim to translate basic knoweldge about children's learning and development into recommendations for more effective and more just systems of early childhood education.

Interests and...

Mark R. Wilson

Mark Wilson's interests focus on measurement and applied statistics. His work spans a range of issues in measurement and assessment from the development of new statistical models for analyzing measurement data, to the development of new assessments in subject matter areas such as science education, patient-reported outcomes and child development, to policy issues in the use of assessment data in accountability systems.

He has recently published three books: the first, Constructing measures: An item response modeling approach (Erlbaum), is an introduction to modern...

Michelle D. Young

Michelle D. Young, PhD, is dean and professor of Berkeley School of Education.

Young began her tenure at Berkeley on June 15, 2023, after serving three years as dean and professor of educational leadership and policy at Loyola Marymount University's School of Education.

At LMU, she created new positions devoted to diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism and justice and embedded that work within the school’s strategic plan. Prior to LMU, Young was a professor of educational leadership and policy, chair of the Department of Education leadership, Foundations and Policy at the...

Michelle Hoda Wilkerson

I am a learning scientist whose work explores computational literacy, with special focus on how young people learn about scientific computing, its power, and its limitations. Most recently, I have explored how two varieties of scientific computing in particular, visual data analysis tools and agent-based simulation, can be responsibly introduced as epistemic tools within the precollegiate curriculum. Because my research focuses on the ways in which these tools allow youth to explore large-scale systems with significant social impacts (e.g. climate, health patterns, nutrition, pollution), I...

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...

Sophia Rabe-Hesketh

Sophia Rabe-Hesketh is a statistician whose research interests include multilevel/hierarchical modeling, item response theory, longitudinal data analysis, and missing data. She has over 130 peer-reviewed articles in over 70 different journals including Psychometrika, Journal of Econometrics, Biometrics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, with an h-index of 74 in Google Scholar. She has developed a modeling framework for a wide range of multilevel and latent variable models called GLLAMM (Generalized Linear Latent and Mixed Modeling) and...

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...