The Carnegie Alpha Lab Research Network, launched by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2012, has named Jeff Kosovich, Brett Peters, and Stephanie Reeves as pre-doctoral fellows for 2013-2014.

The Network supports Carnegie’s Community College Pathways program. This program brings together faculty members, administrators, institutional research staff, and education researchers—all a part of a Networked Improvement Community—to reclaim the mathematical lives of students who place into developmental mathematics in college.

The Alpha Lab Research Network’s goal is to engage academic researchers from diverse fields in helping to improve community college students’ success in developmental mathematics learning. Funded by the National Science Foundation, each fellow will receive $20,000 to conduct early-stage research as part of the Network with support from a mentor at their university.

Jeff Kosovich, at the University of Virginia, will work with mentor Chris Hulleman, a research associate professor in the department of educational leadership, policy, and foundations, to create practical and useful interventions to increase students’ productive persistence. Utilizing a rapid prototyping program of research, they will examine students’ perceptions of usefulness, value, and ability to improve academic outcomes.

Brett Peters, from the University of Rochester, is examining the role of stress in academic outcomes. Collaborating with mentor Jeremy Jamieson, an assistant professor of social psychology, Peters will demonstrate the negative relationship between math anxiety and performance before testing the effectiveness of an adaptive stress intervention. The aim is to create an intervention that can be easily disseminated for enhanced academic achievement.

Under the guidance of David Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, Stephanie Reeves will explore the impact of students’ fixed beliefs about their ability to succeed in college on their persistence and math achievement. Reeves will conduct random assignment experiments to test how the presentation of college as a challenge affects students’ sense of belonging and will design an intervention to help them overcome these difficulties.

Projects were selected based on their potential contributions to the existing priorities within the Carnegie Alpha Lab Research Network. The fellows will help Carnegie to deepen its understanding of a problem and to develop theory-based solutions to challenges within the Network.

Based at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Network is under the direction of faculty members Karen Givvin and Jim Stigler.

For more information on the Carnegie Alpha Lab Research Network or to join the mailing list, visit www.carnegiealphalabs.org.