Teaching, Learning and Technology Ph.D.

I am working with a very talented group of doctoral students, my last group before my targeted retirement at the end of June 2016 (assuming the economy recovers enough to keep me from having to welcome shoppers to Walmart). That means I am no longer accepting new doctoral students, although I am highly flattered to still have a few inquiries, which I must, however, decline. Fortunately, such applicants can find strong dissertation advisers among my highly skilled colleagues.

My doctoral students and I work closely together. We present nationally and internationally each year and, before they finish, each of them should have begun building a national/international reputation by presenting two or three times nationally or internationally and publishing at least two or three refereed articles in strong national or international journals.

Below I talk a bit about what my doctoral students are doing and link you to documents where appropriate.

Adrienne Kotsko. Adrienne's long-term interest has been how to use online technology to enhance the teaching of writing to secondary English students, with a focus on how secondary English teachers are prepared. An experienced high school English teacher herself, Adrienne made the move to college teaching in August 2011 and now teaches the very college-level English teaching methods courses she seeks to enhance. Adrienne has completed her coursework. She collected her data for her dissertation pilot study, wrote up her results and received approval from her Quaifying Committee in February 2014. (For a view of her survey instrument, click here.)

Adrienne has also completed her Comprehensive Exams succesfully. She and I have just submitted a manuscript to English Education in which we discuss results of her pilot study and possible implications for preparing new English teachers to teach writing to their students. We will turn next to a second article from that study, using that article to support the writing of her dissertation proposal. Right now, it looks like her dissertation will focus on how English teachers might more effectively use technology in their teaching.

Yuanyuan Zhang. "Y2" has also completed her doctoral coursework, and, like Adrienne, collected all the data from her dissertation pilot study, analyzed it and submitted her Qualifying Report for which she received committee approval. And Y2 has also passed her Comprehensive Exams. She and I are working now on a couple of articles from that study and she hopes to have her dissertation proposal ready for committee review sometime in Spring 2015.

Paige Hawkins Mattke. Paige is also done with her coursework and has completed her dissertation pilot study. She is finishing data analysis and working on writing up the results for consideration by her Qualifying Committee. This pilot is the needs assessment for design of scaffolding for an online secondary social studies database, her intended dissertation study. Once her committe approves her Qualifying Report, we'll write up our findings for publication. Then it is time to take Comprehensive Exams. Paige plans to use what she has learned in the pilot to prepare her dissertation proposal.

Paige was my grad assistant 2009-2012 and each of those years we conducted a study on how different types of informal educational institutions were using online Open Educational Resources (OERs). In 2013, Educational Technology published our article on how instructional design-oriented Web designers might best work with science museums to help them achieve their educational missions. This article was based on the findings of our recent survey of education directors at science museums and was a follow up to our earlier study on how public history sites (like Ellis Island and Colonial Williamsburg) were using the Web to fulfill their educational missions. The results of that earlier study were published in Educational Technology in 2009.

In addition, Paige and I (along with another student pursuing a doctorate, Mary Fran Daley) had a book review of Deborah Perry's book on museum exhibit design published in Educational Technology in spring 2013. Paige is a bit of a world traveler: She, her husband and their daughter relocated to Turkey, spent a year there, and have now moved back to Dallas, Texas! Thank heavens for Skype which allows us to meet "face-to-face" each week.

Violet Kulo. In spring 2011, Dr. Kulo successfully defended her dissertation on how geographical information systems can be used to teach Web-based scientific inquiry in middle schools. Her dissertation won Lehigh University's Elizabeth V. Stout Award for best dissertation in the College of Education for 2010-11. Violet was also selected as the 2011 graduate student commencement speaker. She is currently employed as an instructional designer at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Dr. Kulo and I continue to collaborate on publishing various aspects of the results of her dissertation and I was her second author on our Spring 2013 article on assessing implementation fidelity in Educational Technology. This represents the second time I have served as second author on an article with Violet; the first was on her 2009 Computers in the Schools article about avoiding the perils of teacher-proof online design.

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The application deadline for applying to the TLT doctoral program is December 1.
To learn more, visit: http://coe.lehigh.edu/academics/degrees/phdtlt