Grant Awards

Belinda Gimbert, Associate Professor, Educational Studies

The HELPERS project team is partnering with several schools and community organizations to improve instruction for English learners (ELs) and bilingual learners. The team will provide training and professional development resources to K-12 pre-service and K-8 in-service teachers, including implementing a Response to Intervention for ELs — small group instructional practice, for hybrid and virtual learning contexts. The team will also train pre-service teachers on bilingual and ESL licensure attainment and will promote literacy to improve parent, family, and community engagement. The project aims to improve English language and literacy proficiency and academic achievement among students. It also hopes to build capacity for educators and families to implement evidence-based and technology-supported EL instructional practices with fidelity.

Rebecca Parker, Program Lead of Learning, School Leadership, & Professional Development

This project supports new career technical education teachers within rehabilitation and corrections through services including assistance with license program enrollment, coursework continuation, classroom observation and feedback. Teachers are also assisted with the license process for the required end-of-resident education assessments. The project team provides professional development opportunities to other groups within the adult correctional field as well, including mentor groups, adult education programs, and other entities seeking career technical licensure information and teaching expertise. The program offers career and technical education experts with teacher education proficiency to prepare these experts to update, maintain, and deliver materials used to train the teachers enrolled in the program. The team has dedicated associates to develop and present curriculum packages and educational instruction with detailed assessment, evaluation, and standards to meet the needs of the licensure coursework.

Martha Belury, Professor, Human Nutrition

Approximately one in four adults in the US have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition that accompanies central obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases plaguing people in the United States. Therapies that reduce fat accumulation in the liver also reduce risk for cardiometabolic diseases; yet, other than weight loss, there lack effective lifestyle therapies that effectively and safely reduce ectopic lipid accumulation in the liver. Dietary oils rich in the bioactive fatty acid, linoleic acid (LA), are reduce waist circumference or visceral adipose, improve glycemic control or insulin sensitivity and reduce risk for type 2 diabetes. Our central hypothesis is that soybean oil supplementation reduces ectopic fat in the liver without altering total body weight while improved cardiometabolic risk markers in adults with NAFLD.

Christopher Zirkle, Associate Professor, Department of Educational StudiesChristopher Zirkle

This grant from the Ohio Department of Education provides funding to support the licensure program in career and technical education in Workforce Development and Education. Activities funded by the grant include a summer workshop for new career-technical education teachers and outreach and technical assistance to more than 30 Ohio school districts, including onsite teacher mentoring.

Dean Lillard, Professor, Consumer Sciences

The project will explore the economic and social effects the mitigation policies and information environment that COVID-19 spawned. We will link those policies to data from ongoing household-based panel studies from 10 countries and rich administrative data from an eleventh. We will exploit the substantial intra and inter-country temporal and geographic variation in non-pharmacological intervention policies induced by the COVID-19 disease. That variation, coupled with pre-COVID baseline levels or long-running trends in the outcomes we will study, will identify the effects of the mitigation policies. Project Details

Laura Justice, Professor; Executive Director of the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy (CCEC)

In the first study to use the innovative technology of radio frequency identification and voice recorders to analyze preschoolers’ social networks over time, faculty experts in early childhood development, engineering, physics and psychology from three universities will collaborate to examine a central research question: To what extent do peer social networks — that is, small groups of children — influence children’s language development in inclusive preschool settings over the course of an academic year? Knowledge gained from this study will help create an intervention for use by children’s peers to support more inclusive preschool classrooms, particularly for children with disabilities or language impairment. The researchers will also study how children’s social-emotional development is affected through peer social networks. Leveraging Sensing Systems in Early Education Project Details
(PDF)
Links to a PDF document.

Barbara Boone, Program Director of Family Engagement

The CETE Family Engagement Program team is partnering with The Ohio Education Leadership Learning Consortium of the greater Cleveland area in the development of an online toolkit of resources for families. For this project, CETE will gather stakeholder input from  families of school age children in the greater Cleveland area along with input from education and organization leaders.  Building upon these insights and incorporating research based practices, the toolkit components will be developed and catalogued. The toolkit will be available to families, the Urban League, area schools and community organizations to equip and empower families as active partners in advocating for their child’s education and for equity and quality in the education system.