Impact Update - January 2024
High-impact grants drive solutions to society’s challenges
The college’s faculty and staff received a number of single- and multi-year grants during the last part of 2023. These far-reaching efforts represent excellence in problem solving and innovation to address society’s greatest needs. Among them were the following awards from prominent agencies.
Center addresses school-family engagement, Ohio career and technical ed testing
The college’s Center on Education and Training for Employment received multiple new grants recently. Ana-Paula Correia, professor of Learning Technologies, directs the center. Two of the outstanding grants are:
Family Engagement Center renews for five years for $4.6M
Barbara Boone, director of the Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center, received an award from the U.S. Department of Education to continue for another five years. The center empowers parents, caregivers, school leaders and community partners to create positive and engaging relationships to support the educational success of K-12 students.
In its first five years, the center accomplished much, including providing 48 districts and 109 schools with training in an evidence-based family engagement model and a coach they could meet with monthly. Next, the center will broaden its reach and launch new initiatives. One effort will support for families of English learners. Another, the Student and Educator Mental Health Program, will train school counselors.
$3.8 million supports technical testing for Ohio career and technical education
Bridget McHugh, senior research specialist and principal investigator, and her team received a two-year grant from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. The effort continues the creation of assessments for Ohio public schools’ 300+ postsecondary career and technical education courses.
With their expertise with credentialing and other high-stakes occupational assessments, McHugh and her team will develop new assessments for the agriculture, arts, communication, environmental science and information technology curriculum.
This includes working with dozens of career and technical education instructors from all regions of Ohio to create course-specific assessments, delivery of over 350,000 assessments and maintenance of a customized scoring and reporting system to serve instructors, school administrators and other stakeholders.
Creating the first suicide prevention program for an entire healthcare system
Darcy Haag Granello, professor of Student Counseling, was funded for $521,359 for the one-year project titled Creating a Comprehensive Suicide Prevention Program at OhioHealth. Based on her many years of experience in suicide prevention programming, she will design and implement the first such program for all medical and support staff throughout the entire OhioHealth system. Ohio Health is headquartered in Columbus and has facilities throughout the state.
The project is the first known effort to create a comprehensive suicide prevention program for the staff of an entire healthcare system. Haag Granello was chosen by OhioHealth because of her years of experience in developing such programs. She is the founder and director of the largest campus program in the US, having developed and implemented Ohio State’s comprehensive suicide prevention plan.
$2.29M enhances Virtual Laboratory School for early childhood professionals
Sarah Lang, assistant professor of Early Childhood Education, received a continuation award for the Virtual Lab School from the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute for Food and Agriculture. Created by the college’s experts more than 10 years ago, the lab school supports the professional development of US military-affiliated childcare programs around the world. These programs have approximately 30,000 positions caring for 200,000 children, and the lab school is the required professional development system for all child and youth educators working in military childcare.
The new grant continues the program, which responds to emerging needs in military settings and reflects the rapidly increasing body of research informing care and education. It features the pairing of high-quality content with job-embedded coaching, which is a critical mechanism to ensuring that knowledge translates into practice. Since the launch of the project’s learning management system in 2016, military childcare professionals have earned more than 2.7 million hours of research-based professional development in the system.