A team of faculty and administrators from the FAMU College of Education is visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) this week to establish a new partnership. The team will meet with UCSB faculty, administrators and students to consider opportunities for collaboration between the two institutions and continue to lay the foundation for a Summer Research and Graduate Admission Pathways Program: the UCSB–FAMU Educational Evaluation Research Scholars Program.The visit, hosted by the UC Educational Evaluation Center (UCEC), is being funded by the UC Office of the President’s UC–HBCU Initiative.
FAMU visiting team is comprised of Patricia Green-Powell, Charles Ervin, Endya Stewart, and Mark Howse. Green-Powell is currently the associate dean of Student Services and associate professor for the College of Education, Department of Educational Leadership. Ervin is associate professor and former chair (2006-2009) of the Department of Secondary Education and Foundations in the College of Education. Stewart is an associate professor of Secondary Education and Foundations and a research associate for the Data Use Research Institute, Teachers for a New Era. Howse is the associate dean of Assessment and Accountability for the College of Education.
“Connecting Networks: UCSB and FAMU” supports academic and co-curricular activities designed to train students in educational evaluation, prepare them for doctoral work, and encourage them to consider a UC graduate program by exposing them to the many opportunities and networks the UC has to offer. This program was one of only eleven proposals funded by the UC Office of the President’s University of California–Historically Black Colleges and Universities Initiative (UC–HBCU) in 2011. John T. Yun, director, and Patricia Marin, associate director of the UC Educational Evaluation Center, serve as the co-principal investigators for this program.
The University of California Educational Evaluation Center utilizes the system-wide expertise of nationally-recognized scholars to address educational problems through the rigorous evaluation of potential educational solutions. Through these evaluations, the UCEC contributes to the knowledge base of effective policies and practices (PK–20 and beyond) with the goal of improving data use and decision-making. The combined experience of the UCEC Site Directors offers content and methodological expertise to successfully conduct national, state, and local educational evaluations, as well as provide training to those seeking to develop evaluation expertise.