Educational, School, & Counseling Psychology E-Newsletter Inside

Program Focus - continued
Drs. Deborah Carr and Steve Whitney, both faculty
members in Educational Psychology.
Under the mentorship of Tim Lewis, Mc-
Glothlin is researching the impact of teacher
reactions on student behaviors in middle school
classrooms. She gathers data on how teachers
react when their students are on or off task and
compares it to the students’ response. “Once
the teachers became more positive toward their
students, the kids became more engaged,” Mc-
Glothlin says. And while the quantifiable results
haven’t come in yet, she says “just from watching
the kids over the semester, I could tell which ones
improved. I can see what works. I can see what’s
impacting students at the same time I’m doing the
study.”
A Different Language
When they’re not researching, students have
a weekly class where they learn the basics of research.
“It’s a totally different language,” says
Tanya Behrens, a middle-school language arts
major, about research. “In the class, I’ve learned
the processes, the grunt work, all the hoops you
have to jump through to do research.” Behrens,
who researches how preservice teachers develop
expectations for student performance, said she
had the opportunity to develop her own research
questions within the project.
“Teacher expectations are said to have a
direct correlation to how students perform, so
it’s really important to study,” says Behrens. So
if a teacher assumes a particular student will do
well or poorly, it is more likely that student will
perform the way they are expected. This can be
problematic when expectations are tied to surface
features, such as race or gender. But as she gathered
data from pre-service teachers, she noticed
surface characteristics were not a large factor in
the expectations of teachers. So Behrens and another
student in the course, Courtney Cady, went
back to the data and noticed that other factors, like
coming from a stable home and being active in
extracurricular activities, were more likely to affect
how teachers expected their students would
do in class.
“You learn from everything,” says Behrens.
In this study, “I learned to watch what my expectations
are. I know that, because of this study, I am
more aware of where my judgments fall and how
I react to them.” But will that make her a better
teacher? “I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll have to
find out.”
Courtney Cady, Tanya Behrens and
Dr. Deborah Carr
Preparing for the Future
The students in the Undergraduate Honors
program want to be teachers in elementary, middle
or high school classrooms; but in many instances,
education research is most common in counseling
psychology or at the higher education level. So
why is the emphasis on research helpful for future
teachers?
For Stephen Whitney, who teaches the class
section of the program, it’s about preparing future
teachers to make decisions for their classrooms
and careers. “The class is meant to help students
learn the different aspects of research and to make
them good consumers of it when they’re teach-