International Research

Shirley Brice Heath, Professor of Education and Professor at Large

Shirley Brice Heath, Professor of Education and Professor at Large, has for the past five years directed the International Enquiry Network for the Arts Council of England. She has produced (with Shelby Wolf, Professor of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder) two volumes of research reports that have been distributed in England and Australia through Creative Partnerships, a governmental program to advance opportunities for scientists and artists to work with schools in projects that benefit the local communities. Two more volumes will be published later this year, a special journal issue will be dedicated to her work on arts and learning with Shelby Wolf, and several journal articles have been published in the US and England. This research has centered on the linguistic and cognitive aspects of long-term learning for children who work intensively with professional artists and scientists. She also works with colleagues at Kings College, University of London, and she is currently co-authoring with Brian Street of Kings College, a volume on ethnography in the study of language and literacy. She lectures frequently in Europe, particularly Sweden and Germany, and she frequently offers workshops and seminars through several universities in England.

In Umea, Sweden in late August, Shirley Brice Heath gave the keynote address at the International Society of Historians of Education. This year's meeting was devoted to the history of literacy, and Shirley's talk compared the expectations and representations of visual literacy in 13th century Italy with today's public advertising, graffiti art, and film openings. She noted the inclusion in forms of both eras of vignettes (internal narratives signalled in visual story-boarding), multiple layering of narratives, and representations of communal membership.

In September, Shirley joined with a small group of policy-oriented scholars to set research standards for studies of out-of-school learning. The group gathered at Princeton to assess current status, professionalization of leaders in out-of-school organizations, and difficulties created by the abundance of evaluation designs over basic research. Representatives from medical education, social work, teacher education, and testing organizations attended.

Jin Li, Associate Professor Education and Human Development

Jin Li, Associate Professor of Education and Human Development, has been for the past eight years collaborating with international scholars from three different regions. Since 1998, she has been conducting research with Dr. Xiaodong Yue, City University of Hong Kong, on children’s learning beliefs. In 2003, she received funding from Chiang-Ching Kuo Foundation to collaborate with Dr. Heidi Fung, Academia Sinica, Taiwan on a project that examines Taiwanese and European American children’s self-concepts, parental socialization of learning beliefs, and parental emotional responses to children’s learning attitudes and achievement. In 2004 with funding from the Spencer Foundation, Jin Li began collaborating with Dr. Sidney Strauss from Tel Aviv University, Israel, on children’s natural cognition of teaching and learning with Israeli and Chinese children teaching each other and mothers teaching their young children. These collaborations have led to publications and presentations at international conferences. These projects are continuing, and more publications will result as we analyze more data. In addition, Jin Li has lectured at universities in Hong Kong and throughout China and will deliver a keynote address in Korea in October, 2006. Moreover, Jin Li has presented research papers at conferences of the International Society for Behavioral Development in Beijing, China; Ottawa, Canada; Ghent, Belgium, and Melbourne, Australia, as well as at the European Conference on Developmental Psychology in Uppsala, Sweden and Milan, Italy; and at the conference of the British Education Research Association, Leeds, UK.


Martin West, Assistant Professor of Education and Political Science

Martin West, Assistant Professor of Education and Political Science, will in the Summer of 2007 continue his collaborative research using international education datasets with Ludger Woessmann, Head of Department at the Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich. In earlier work, published in the European Economic Review and the European Journal of Political Economy, West and Woessmann examined the effects of class-size on student achievement in 11 countries around the world and differences in resource allocation patterns between and within schools in various national school systems. Their next project will analyze the institutional and policy determinants of differences in the performance of high-achieving students on international assessments of student performance.