Education professors receive prestigious Spencer Awards

Sara Y. Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor in the departments of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been awarded a 2006 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Goldrick-Rab is one of 20 fellows selected from a competitive pool of nearly 200 applicants. Each of the fellows will receive $55,000 to advance their research.

Goldrick-Rab’s project, “Investigating the Postsecondary Transitions of Urban Public School Students,” involves working with a team at the Consortium for Chicago School Research to analyze college data on several cohorts of students from the Chicago Public Schools, with the goal of understanding inequalities in their college trajectories. As a Spencer fellow, Goldrick-Rab will be able to take the equivalent of one year’s teaching leave to focus on her research.

The fellowships are administered by the National Academy of Education, an honorary educational society, and are funded by a grant to the academy from the Spencer Foundation. Lorrie Shepard, academy president, says the fellowship program not only promotes important research, but also helps to develop the careers of scholars who demonstrate great promise for making significant contributions to the field of education.

Now in its 20th year, the fellowship program has more than 500 alumni who include many of the strongest education researchers in the field today. This year’s recipients include 18 postdoctoral researchers from the United States and one each from Canada and Hong Kong.

Two other UW–Madison education professors were awarded grants from the Spencer Foundation. They are:

• John L. Rudolph, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, has received a two-year, $40,000 research grant from the Spencer Foundation for a project titled “Modern Science and the American High School: Portrayals of Scientific Process from 1887-2061.” Rudolph plans to produce a book, consisting of a series of historical snapshots that examine how the process of science has been portrayed in the nation’s classrooms from the late 1800s to the most recent era of standards and accountability. The project aims to provide insight into the changing relationship between science and society and contribute to the understanding of the role of science education in mediating the relationship between scientific experts and the American lay public.
• Catherine Compton-Lilly, an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, has received a $39,100 grant from the Spencer Foundation for the final phase of her 10-year longitudinal case study, “Reading and Schooling Across Time and Space: Following Students from First Grade Through High School.” Compton-Lilly has been examining the understandings and attitudes about reading that urban students and their parents bring to the classroom and how these have changed as the students progress through school.