Tamara Tate, PhD

Spotlight on Equity

My article with Mark Warschauer  "Equity in online learning" is available in Educational Psychologist.  The article discusses access and achievement in K-12 and higher education both before and after March 2020 through the lens of Warschauer's 2003 social inclusion framework.  Differing access to online learning, particularly when it becomes the primary mode of education, contributes to stratification or inclusion that is in part reflected in student attendance and achievement outcomes.
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Hybrid Professional Development

This recent Edutopia article explains the "Keys to successful professional learning." We urge districts to ensure that professional learning be aligned with five research-based drivers:
  1. The content is relevant, useful, and timely.
  2. Teachers have agency and autonomy.
  3. Cycles of learning allow for practice, reflection, and adaptation.
  4. Foster social connection and active learning.
  5. Base experience on a quality technology platform.
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Tamara Tate is a Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and Assistant Director of the Digital Learning Lab.

​She leads the Lab's work on Investigating Digital Equity and Achievement (IDEA), partnering with school districts, universities, nonprofit organizations, media and tech developers, and others in iterative development and evaluation of digital and online tools to support teaching and learning. As part of this work, she studies secondary student writing as a member of the IES-funded national WRITE Center and is part of the Elementary Computing for All team.

She received her B.A. in English and her Ph.D. in Education at U.C. Irvine and her J.D. at U.C. Berkeley. 

Dr. Tate can be reached at tatet@uci.edu
WRITE Center

Interested in writing in history classes?  Visit the IES-funded WRITE Center website for great resources on writing, history, and our work on a new intervention. The WRITE (Writing Research to Improve Teaching and Evaluation) Center for Secondary Students researches academic writing, placing special emphasis on source-based argument writing in history, and provides national leadership and outreach activities to support improvement of secondary writing research and practice related to academic writing across the curriculum. The Digital Learning Lab is supporting the WRITE Center through analysis of writing corpora and development of digital tools to support the teaching and learning of source-based argument writing in history. 

Elementary Computing For All

A collaboration between with university researchers and K-12 practitioners to promote computational thinking for multilingual students in elementary schools.  Visit the website for more information and resources including curriculum for teachers. 

Personalized Professional Learning Pathways

This project is researching the impact of providing teachers the choice of completing a professional learning pathway on building teachers’ capacities and improving teaching and learning.  We employ both quantitative and qualitative methods to understand teachers’ experiences and program evaluation.  Learning pathways include synchronous online sessions, asynchronous online materials, videotaped lessons of teachers’ implementing the course materials, and personal coaching to improve teachers’ implementation.  Our first report in March 22 can be found here.

​Despite the stressors that learning facilitators have experienced during this pandemic, they dedicated a great deal of time and energy to the key content areas covered by the Pathways. Unlike traditional, one-size-fits-all professional learning, the personalized, flexible, and multimodal learning of the Pathways allowed learning facilitators to carve out time and take advantage of the opportunity. Working as a community to delve into these important topics created a space for them to practice and reflect on authentic solutions to real issues for their learners. 

Districts planning personalized professional learning are encouraged to:
  • Focus on authentic, relevant content to allow learning facilitators to address the most pressing needs of their learners;
  • Provide time for cycles of learning, practice, reflection, and adaptation over substantial periods of time;
  • Utilize multiple modalities (e.g., seminars, book studies, asynchronous courses) so that learning facilitators can engage more deeply and broadly in a topic than a single one-day meeting would allow; 
  • Include both synchronous opportunities to engage as a community and asynchronous ones to allow learning facilitators to customize the timing of their work.
Moving forward, LUSD leadership could further improve the Pathways in three ways. First, facilitators could build in more active learning opportunities and community interaction wherever possible, especially during asynchronous online learning. Second, they could better embed scaffolds to support self-regulated learning and increase persistence. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, learning facilitators should be explicitly encouraged to engage in active, intentional reflection on their experience as online learners. In this way, the online professional learning could actually serve as a model for how future instruction (online and in person) could be scaffolded. We believe that this is an opportunity to both improve the adult learning experience and create transferable lessons for the learning facilitators to carry into their own learning environments. Strong scaffolding of self-regulated learning and interaction improves both online and face-to-face experiences.

While not every learning facilitator will have the time or bandwidth to participate in all professional learning opportunities, we believe that making these opportunities available contributes to an environment of continuous learning and improvement.
Investigating Digital Equity and Achievement (IDEA)  

We partner with school districts, universities, nonprofit organizations, media and tech developers, and others in iterative development and evaluation of digital and online tools to support teaching and learning. Our various projects are discussed on the Digital Learning Lab website.

Online Learning Research Center

Created in spring 2020 to communicate research-based information about online learning to those forced online due to emergency distance learning, the OLRC’s website provides access to 5 years’ NSF-funded research about online learning conducted by the Digital Learning Lab. Whether a first-time online instructor looking to get started, a veteran seeking to improve online teaching, a student seeking ways to improve online study skills, or a scholar or educational leader seeking the latest research on online learning, the OLRC.US site was designed to provide evidence-based resources to improve achievement and equity in online learning.