Richard Durán of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Education (NAEd). As an honorific society, the Academy consists of U.S. members and international associates—fewer than 300 professors worldwide—who are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education. Founded in 1965, the mission of the NAEd is to advance high-quality research to improve education policy and practice.
The Academy convenes annually for papers, symposia, and informal conversation. It sponsors committee studies, publishes reports, and administers the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral and Dissertation Fellowship Programs. Members are frequently invited to become involved in our activities in a variety of ways, including serving on committees, attending meetings, and representing the Academy at research or dissemination events.
Richard Durán is a Professor in the Department of Education. Most of his research interests are centered on literacy and learning of persons from varied language and cultural backgrounds, but they are not confined solely to learning in school settings. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1977 he worked at Educational Testing Service in Princeton conducting investigations and publishing research findings on the validity of the SAT, GRE, and TOEFL tests. This work benefited from his graduate training in quantitative and cognitive psychology. One of the main findings of this research was that SAT test scores predict early college grades less accurately for Latino students as compared to other students, but that there was clear evidence of poor schooling preparation of Latino students. Yet despite the latter evidence, Duran was not convinced that students’ true learning potential was assessed adequately by standardized tests. As a result, he developed a strong interest in how more effective instruction could be designed to assist academic outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse students who don’t perform well on standardized tests and who come from low-income families. Enter social constructionism and cultural psychology as new fields for his research.
Since joining the GSE faculty in 1984, Professor Durán has carried out a research program investigating learning and culture itself as socially constructed. This work has been heavily influenced by the emergence of cultural psychology as a field drawing on the work of the cultural historical or Vygotskian views of cognitive development and activity theory. His research teams have investigated how classroom interaction leads to the construction of learning expertise, how teachers design and implement constructivist learning activities for students, and how students’ self-awareness of their performance leads to new notions of assessment. This research has been funded in recent years by the Center for Research on Education Standards and Testing, and the Center for Research on Education of Students Placed At-Risk.
As his team has pursued research in classrooms, it has realized the value of a more ecologically complex approach to improving educational outcomes. Accordingly, in collaboration with Prof. Betsy Brenner he and his team are now pursuing research on children’s’ learning in after-school computer club settings with support from the UC LINKS after-school computer club network. Separately, the Mellon Foundation also supports his research on new models of literacy achievement arising through children’s’ computer club participation. Another strand of new research is working with the immigrant parents of students to help them acquire knowledge of how to use computers and how to work with their children on research and publication projects. This latter research is supported by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence. Concern for electronic technology and its facilitation of learning as a social process is a unifying theme across his research projects.
Professor Durán joins Professor Emeritus Russell Rumberger as the two National Academy of Education members in the Gevirtz School.