22
Feb
2022
UW-Madison Graduate School Features ITP Fellow Elise Marifian
When she was young, Elise Marifian was already curious about poverty and the major discrepancies between what people have or don’t have.
“I grew up really close by to a community that’s very, very impoverished,” Marifian said, adding that she would notice other kids in that community. “I knew, even though I was young, that the world they lived in was so different from mine, and the opportunities that I had were just not within their reach. And so I was always really curious about why those differences existed and whether or not something could be done.”
Over time, other experiences underscored that curiosity and homed in on what would eventually become the topic of her PhD dissertation. Marifian took a family trip to Armenia, her ancestral homeland, where she also saw a lot of poverty. In college, she took a macroeconomics course in the spring of 2008, right as the financial crisis was unfolding.
After college, she got a job working at the Federal Reserve Bank in its economic research division. She remembers how one day while chatting with an acquaintance, she found herself speaking passionately about educational inequities.
“It just dawned on me that I wanted to research that,” she said.
Marifian applied for the PhD program at the UW–Madison Department of Economics, attracted by its reputation as a strong department and the many world-class economics faculty who research education. Marifian added that the fact that UW–Madison has a great School of Education was also an important factor.
17
Dec
2018
Awards & Accomplishments
The following ITP Fellows successfully defended their dissertations in spring and summer 2019.
Stacy Priniski (Psychology): “Helping Underrepresented Students Find Prosocial Value in STEM: An Intersectional Approach to Utility-Value Interventions.”
Garret Hall (Educational Psychology): “Modeling Associations of English Proficiency and Working Memory with Mathematics Growth: Implications for RTI.”
Jaymes Pyne (Sociology): “Contingent Socialization and the Process of Engagement in School”.
Sally Wu (Educational Psychology): “How Drawing Prompts Can Help Students Learn Visual-Spatial Content in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).”
Alex Schmidt (Sociology): “Examining the Effects of a Need-Based Grant Offer through Machine Learning: Impacts, Targeting, and Prediction.”
12
Dec
2018
Student Publications and Research
Recent Student Publications
(Current students in bold, ITP faculty in italics, alumni in red)
Crooks, N.M., Bartel, A.N., Alibali, M.W. (2019). Conceptual knowledge of confidence intervals in psychology undergraduate and graduate students. Statistics Education Research Journal, 18(1), 46.
Hecht, C. A., Priniski, S. J., Harackiewicz, J. M. (2019). Understanding long-term effects of motivation interventions in a changing world. In E. Gonida & M. Lemos (Eds.), Advances in Motivation and Achievement. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group.
Priniski, S. J., Rosenzweig, E. Q., Canning, E. A., Hecht, C.A., Tibbetts, Y., Hyde, J. S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2019). The benefits of combining value for the self and others in utility-value interventions. Journal of Educational Psychology.DOI: 10.1037/edu0000343
Alibali, M.W., Brown, S.A. & Menendez, D. (2019). Understanding strategy change: Contextual, individual, and metacognitive factors. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 56, 227-256.
Brown, S. A., Menendez, D., & Alibali, M. W. (2019). Strategy adoption depends on characteristics of the instruction, learner, and strategy. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. doi: 10.1186/s41235-019-0158-3