People
Susan Millar (Principal Investigator)
sbmillar@wisc.edu
753E Ed Sciences
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison WI, 53705
Susan Millar is a senior scientist with the UW-Madison's Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), and Director of the Education Research & Development Group of the Wisconsin Institutes for Research. A cultural anthropologist by training (Cornell, Ph.D, 1981), her work during the last 20 years has focused on organizational change processes and student and faculty learning associated with efforts to improve education in the science and engineering disciplines.
At WCER, she is the Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Mobilizing STEM Education for a Sustainable Future project, and the PI of the CCHER project.
Experience gained in a variety of other positions prepared Dr. Millar for her current roles. These positions include: lecturer for the UW-Madison Women's Studies Program (1981-85); policy analyst for the University of Wisconsin System Administration (1985-89); co-director of the National Study of Master's Degrees (1989-91); Research Associate at the Study of Higher Education and Affiliate Assistant Professor of the College of Education, both at the Pennsylvania State University (1991-94); "lead Fellow" for the Institute on Learning Technology, a project of the National Institute for Science Education (NISE) College Level One team (1999-2001), founder and director of Learning through Evaluation, Adaptation, and Dissemination (LEAD) Center (1994-2002), lead evaluator for the Regional Workshop Program (a nation-wide science faculty development project), a lead evaluator for the System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators (an NSF-funded comprehensive Math and Science Partnership project), and the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (an NSF-funded Higher Education Center for Learning and Teaching project), and external evaluator for the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education at the University of Washington (an NSF-funded Higher Education Center for Learning and Teaching project), and the Puerto Rico Math Science Partnership. She also has participated in the many NSF panel and program reviews and on the national advisory boards of many organizations seeking to improve science learning in higher education.
Charles Kalish (co-Principal Investigator)
cwkalish@wisc.edu
Rm 880B Educational Sciences
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison WI, 53705
Charles Kalish’s research focuses on inductive inference and causal reasoning: how do we predict the future and learn from experience? One line of research explores how children acquire the set of commonsense beliefs that characterize adult thinking. He is particularly interested in children's developing appreciation of physical and intentional causality. Current research addresses the role of norms in social cognition. How does children's understanding of rules and obligations develop, and what role does such understanding play in predicting and explaining people's behavior? A second line of research concerns more general processes of categorization and inference. He explores how people use evidence to make category-based inductions, and how beliefs about the nature and origins of categories affect learning and judgment.
The ability to generalize past experience to new situations, to make inductive inferences, is central to what we think of as learning. We want children to know how to use what they have already learned to make successful judgments about new and less familiar circumstances. He hopes that studying the process of generalization will tell us more about how children learn.
Matthew Hora (Researcher)
hora@wisc.edu
766 Ed Sciences
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison WI, 53705
Matthew Hora is an Assistant Professor in Adult Teaching and Learning in the Department of Liberal Arts and Applied Studies at UW-Madison, and a research scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. He received his Masters in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland, College Park after several years experience in organic agriculture and food systems research. He has spent the past seven years working in program evaluation, specializing in assessing the effects of pedagogical reforms in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields at the tertiary level.
Hora’s research aims to bring the methods and theory of cultural anthropology and the learning sciences to the study of teaching and organizational change in higher education. His research on the influence of the organizational context and cultural norms for the National Science Foundation funded SCALE project focused on the multi-level and multi-dimensional aspects of both individual and organizational learning. He has continued this line of research to develop new research methods and theoretical frameworks to account for the cognitive, cultural, and contextual aspects of teaching behaviors in higher education. Hora is applying these methods to develop evaluation instruments and frameworks so that program administrators, evaluators, and other stakeholders can obtain a more nuanced and multi-faceted picture of how pedagogical reforms unfold in complex organizational environments.
Joe Ferrare (Associate Researcher)
ferrare@wisc.edu
764 Ed Sciences
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison WI, 53705
Joe Ferrare is an Assistant Researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and also serves as an Adjunct Professor in sociology of education at Western Washington University. A sociologist of education by training (Ph.D., 2011, UW-Madison), Joe's primary research interests focus on the ways in which social hierarchies are transformed into educational hierarchies through patterns of course-taking, attainment, and persistence at the secondary and postsecondary levels. These interests are driven by his broader goal of rethinking the status attainment model of education. This project involves the development of a field theory of educational practices to account for the ways that educational inequalities are produced through strategies arising out of interactions between social actors and their positions in complex socio-spatial environments.
Joe has been a member of the CCHER team since the project began in 2009. In that time he has been responsible for contributing to all aspects of the project including research design, data collection, analysis, and writing manuscripts for publication. Joe brings a strong theoretical background in sociology of education, which he has applied to the understanding of the cultural aspects of the CCHER project. He has also been responsible for utilizing numerous combinations of methodological tools, including multidimensional scaling, social network analysis, thematic analysis, hierarchical linear modeling, correspondence analysis, factor analysis, and structural equation modeling.
Amanda Oleson (Project Assistant)
aoleson@wisc.edu
764 Ed Sciences
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison WI, 53705
Amanda Oleson is a first year Master’s student in Education Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in the sociology of education with an emphasis on the transition of students from high school to college and how a variety of factors affect access and persistence. Since working with the CCHER project, she has developed a particular interest in the uptake of higher education reform and in the psychology of faculty, specifically decision-making processes and faculty perceived effectiveness. The CCHER project grants her a unique opportunity to practice mixed methods analyses on data in a higher education context, while also allowing her to explore different internal and external influences on faculty.
Former Project Assistants
Jeremiah Holden (Project Assistant)
jiholden@wisc.edu
764 Ed Sciences
1025 W. Johnson St
Madison, WI 53705
Remi Holden is a PhD student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. In addition to his work on the CCHER project at WCER, his research interests include the design and implementation of learning interventions utilizing mobile technologies in place-based mathematics education. A former high school civics and middle school mathematics teacher in New York City, he is an alumnus of the University of Michigan-Flint Technology in Education: Global Program and Teach For America. Remi also supervises pre-service teachers in the UW Mathematics Education program and serves as Executive Director of InGlobal, an organization that designs and supports educational technology projects.
Craig Anderson (Project Assistant)
cdanderson@wisc.edu
764 Ed Sciences
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison WI, 53705
Craig Anderson is a PhD candidate in the Educational Psychology Department at UW Madison. He His research is currently focused on examining questions in normative psychology. He is especially curious about the ways that people think about what they ‘should’ do, how they decide what are the right and wrong things to do. Several of his studies have looked at the institution of ownership through the lens of moral and normative psychology. For his dissertation research, he is examining the ways in which beliefs and reasoning are normative and perhaps even moral, in that people believe that they ‘should’ hold certain beliefs, or reason in particular ways. The CCHER project allows him the opportunity to look at norms outside of the laboratory and in the complex real world contexts of teaching in higher education.
CCHER is housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Copyright ©2009, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
The CCHER project is funded by the National Science Foundation under Award # DRL-0814724