Tamara Tate
Tamara is the Assistant Director of the  Digital Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine and a project scientist at the national IES-funded WRITE Center. She received her B.A. in English and her Ph.D. in Education at U.C. Irvine. Tamara focuses on K-12 literacy education, technology-supported learning, and exceptional learners of all types.  Her work has ranged from secondary analyses of the 2011 NAEP writing assessment, the first national US writing assessment given on computers, to a year long within-teacher RCT of a digital literacy intervention in 10 urban middle schools. She is also using longitudinal SEM and data mining techniques to analyze student online digital writing over 5 school years in two US school districts.

Dr. Tate can be reached at tatet@uci.edu
Her current CV can be found here.
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. 
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.