Grants, Awards and Achievements: February 2023

The College of Education is home to innovative, world-class faculty members and practitioners who conduct industry-leading research year-round. Every month, we collectively share and celebrate the members of our community – faculty, students and administrators – who receive a wide range of grants, fellowships and a myriad of awards recognizing both work and impact.

If you have a grant, award, special project or fellowship announcement you would like reflected in our next monthly email, please share it by submitting your information or emailing coecommunications@austin.utexas.edu. Hook ’em!

Curriculum and Instruction

Cathery Yeh • Assistant Professor

Cathery Yeh received the 2023 Early Career Publication Award of the Special Interest Group for Research in Mathematics Education for her publication, “From the margin to the center: A framework for rehumanizing mathematics education for students with disabilities,” published in Journal of Mathematical Behavior in 2020. The purpose of the Early Career Publication Award is to recognize an outstanding mathematics education research publication by an early career scholar. The selection committee was impressed with the quality of the research and writing, as well as the significant impact Dr. Yeh’s manuscript can have on the field of mathematics education and across fields.

Educational Leadership and Policy

Rodrigo Aguayo • Ph.D. Student
Armando Lizarraga • Ph.D. Student
Lesley Hernandez Silva • Ph.D. Student

Congratulations to Ph.D. students, Rodrigo Aguayo, Armando Lizarraga and Lesley Hernandez Silva, on being recipients of the 2023 Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education (TACHE) Graduate Fellowship Award. The fellowships are awarded to Texas residents pursuing graduate studies in community college leadership, higher education leadership or other graduate or professional academic programs and each student will receive a $2,000 fellowship. TACHE is a professional association committed to the improvement of educational and employment opportunities for Chicanos in higher education.

Special Education

Erica Fry • Ph.D. Student
Zhina Shen • Ph.D. Student

Congratulations to Erica Fry and Zhina Shen, doctoral students in the Department of Special Education, who have been awarded a Candace S. Bos Innovative Project Grant​ from the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD). The Candace S. Bos Innovative Projects grants support doctoral students, teachers and other personnel who provide services to students with learning disabilities as they develop creative projects to enhance instruction, curriculum, action research and service delivery for students with learning disabilities. With the mentorship of her advisor, Dr. Jessica Toste, Erica’s dissertation research will study the impact of an online professional learning community (PLC) to promote data-based instruction and social-emotional learning for early career special education teachers. Zhina, who works under the supervision of Dr. Sarah Powell, will study the effect of concrete representational abstract (CRA) framework with schema embedded intervention on word problem solving (WPS) for students with mathematics difficulties.