BIOGRAPHIES

Walt Haney, Ed.D., Professor of Education at Boston College and Senior Research Associate in the Center for the Study of Testing Evaluation and Educational Policy (CSTEEP), specializes in educational evaluation and assessment and educational technology. He has published widely on testing and assessment issues in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, Review of Educational Research, and Review of Research in Education and in wide-audience periodicals such as Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Washington Post. He has served on the editorial boards of Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice and the American Journal of Education and on the National Advisory Committee of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation.
For the last several years, Haney directing a CSTEEP project aimed at implementing new models of assessment in schools developed under the Co-NECT project of Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. with funding from the New American Schools Development Corporation. He has also served as an expert witness in federal court cases concerning testing and assessment (for the Office of the Attorney General of New York and the U.S. Department of Justice) and has consulted on a case in which it is alleged that the National Merit Scholarship program has been discriminating against women.
Among other current special topics, Haney is interested in educational applications of the World Wide Web, using innovative forms of assessment (such as children's drawings and computerized assessments) to make assessment more educationally useful, an anomaly in the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and cheating on tests (and statistical methods used -- and sometimes misused -- to detect cheating).
In the past three years, Walt and others have been investigating the use of student drawings as a means of documenting the educational ecology of classrooms and schools.

Statement of Interest

I first used drawings in research with refugees in Laos in the early 1970s and with graduate students studying alternative forms of inquiry about technology in the 1980s, but it was not until 1994 that drawings were used in one of CSTEEP's research projects. In 1994, I began including lectures and exercises on drawings in graduate courses on research methods at Boston College. While drawings clearly afford a limited picture of what occurs in schools, we are strong advocates of employing multiple methods of research and evaluation. In the research proposed, we devote more attention to drawings than to other means of assessment, not because we think that other forms cannot yield important perspectives on what goes on in schools and classrooms; rather, we focus on drawings simply because this form of assessment has been so widely neglected in educational research in general and in particular as a window through which students' perspectives on education and schools can be made visible.

Lisa R. Jackson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Developmental and Educational Psychology program at Boston CollegeÕs School of Education. Her areas of specialty are child and adolescent development. Her research interests include the schooling experiences of students of color, and ethnic and gender identity development. Her current work includes a research/intervention effort exploring the relationship between self-concept and school engagement for African American adolescents.

Dr. Jackson has taught at both the post-secondary and secondary level. Prior to her position at Boston College, Dr. Jackson was involved with policy analysis and project evaluation at a private policy firm in Washington DC. There she conducted research and analysis of public policy issues in education including migrant education, integrated services, Chapter 1 programs, national school reform, and academic instruction. Other evaluation work includes serving as an evaluation consultant for the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and the Center for Collaborative Change in San Francisco, California.

Statement of Interest

My primary reason for becoming involved in this project lies in my interest in students' perceptions of schooling experiences. Research in education has highlighted the importance of students' engagement in school, a sense of belonging in school, and teacher expectations of students as being important to the outcome of their education (i.e., academic performance). Much of our knowledge in this area comes from traditional quantitative measures that tell us little about the quality of student experience as determined by criteria defined by the students themselves. Student drawings have opened up the window to information about the quality of students' experiences in schools that can only contribute to our broader understanding of schools and how they work.
This research is also closely related to work I have done in the past. I have looked at the schooling experiences of African American and Latino students as well as the experiences of boys and girls within these groups. While much is know about these students' academic performance, little is known of their perception of their schooling experiences. I hope through this project to highlight these students' experiences and to look at the relationship between these students' experiences, their teachers' interpretations of these experiences, and students' overall performance. In addition, as a developmental psychologist, I am interested in how these perceptions change over time. Comparing student drawings from elementary to middle school (and possibly from middle school to high school) can provide us with an understanding of the importance of these transitions for continued positive school engagement and investment. One example is the change in experience for girls in their interest in math and science. Research tells us that this interest diminishes as girls proceed through school. How are girls' perceptions of math and science changing over time? What classroom factors are they highlighting in their drawings that can help identify the reasons for their change in perception? By uncovering this information and working directly with schools and teachers, we have a chance at improving the ecology of classrooms such that we positively impact the schooling and academic experience of students. Given that the original focus of this research is school reform both at the school level and the teacher level, I think it is imperative that we bring to the foreground the experiences of students. For it is their experience that we ultimately want to enrich. Without their perspective, our vision for improvement is greatly narrowed.

Michael Russell, M.Ed., is a Research Associate for Boston College's Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy. In addition to his work on the Drawing on Education project, Russell also directs assessment activities for the Vanguard Project, a project funded by the National Science Foundation to study strategies for initiating and supporting systemic change across school systems. Through a grant from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, he works with several school districts to improve reporting practices and to use student level data to inform school wide strategies. Michael was the principal investigator for a project in which he worked with schools receiving support from New American Schools to implement comprehensive, school wide assessment programs.
Russell works regularly with teachers and administrators to use assessment results to establish and measure school-wide goals. He has designed and authored computer based assessments, custom data entry/analysis tools and item data bank/search engine and initiated a study on the effect writing assessments performed via paper-and-pencil has on the responses of students accustomed to writing on a computer. He has taught courses on Classroom Assessment and Assessment and Standards. Russell is currently completing the Ph.D. program at Boston College in Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation.

Statement of Interest

During the past four years, we have used drawings to collect information about classroom practices and to engage teachers in reflecting on their practices. We have found drawings are an effective way to stimulate conversations about teaching and learning. Until recently, however, we have not thoroughly investigated the extent to which drawings accurately capture classroom practices. In this project, my work will focus on issues of validity and reliability. Specifically, I will explore the following questions: How well do drawings capture teaching and learning in the classroom? How stable are classroom images over time? How reliably are drawings analyzed and how valid are the conclusions one draws from images of the classroom?