Centers/Institutes, Labs and Programs
We are focused on solving some of education’s most complex challenges, and providing opportunities for all. Here, you will find multidisciplinary teams working together in pursuit of extraordinary results.
Research Centers/Institutes
Labs
The Culturally Responsive Instructional Supervision Practices (CRISP) Lab uses the development of critical consciousness, the use of physiological data to understand what happens to the body when discussing practices that lack cultural responsiveness and artificial intelligence (AI) to inform culturally responsive instructional supervision strategies for both teachers and principals to help produce equitable academic outcomes for students who are marginalized, minoritized and otherized. We seek to support and develop innovative professional development and training for PK-12 educators to assess, implement and develop cultural competencies through AI collaboration and feedback, which can inform leadership development, organizational decisions and help improve team dynamics to ensure the implementation of culturally responsive instruction. By collecting data from wearable physiological devices, the CRISP Lab studies how AI can support the development of equity-oriented educational leadership and inform communication patterns in classroom instruction, which can revolutionize how practitioners, policymakers and researchers work together to generate real solutions for a more equitable and just US education system. As such, we seek to leverage interdisciplinary perspectives and cutting-edge methodologies to address educational and instructional issues at the local, state and federal levels by bringing together experts in educational leadership, computer science, sociology and beyond.
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The Computational Literacies Lab studies how students, teachers and school communities learn with and about computers. We are focused on four big questions:
- What does it mean to learn computer science?
- How can new computational media unlock new forms of learning?
- How can we prepare teachers to effectively and equitably teach K12 computer science?
- What kinds of social and technical infrastructure are needed to help school communities implement high-quality computer science that fits their cultures and priorities?
Get involved. Attend our weekly open lab meetings, join the email list or take a course in the lab. Interested faculty, students and the broader university community are warmly invited to contact Dr. Proctor.
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The EIS lab investigates the role of the body in communication in STEM education. In particular, we look at how gesture and other embodied communicational resources are used in science, mathematics and computer science teaching and learning. Our interdisciplinary work is informed by interactional approaches to embodiment and multimodality, including ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and the co-operative action framework.
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The Gender Policy Lab (GPL) is a scholarly and policy practitioner incubator and forum for the development of policy solutions to structured inequality. The primary focus of the GPL is linkages between gender, politics, and policy—and in particular, those dynamics that reproduce structural violence and systemic inequities. The GPL is dedicated to increasing critical methodological research, policy analyses, and respective prevention and intervention tools to rights abuses experienced by women and adolescent girls from diverse backgrounds and contexts.
The GPL supports the co-production of knowledge by researchers and practitioners representing a range of fields and methodological expertise, with the secondary aim of facilitating uptake within legislation and local-to-global organizations. By networking with public educators, health professionals, and legal experts, GPL strives to enhance research discovery and translation into policy development and solutions that tackle individual and community problems in global education, health, law, and related sectors. Through the intentional development of community-centered partnerships, GPL scholarship and practice will work to expand everyday public awareness of the causes, effects, and potential interventions into structural harm, while also tangibly increasing the standard of living for those historically un- and under-served by economic, educational, legal, and social systems.
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The University at Buffalo's Open Education Research Lab's core mission is to actively engage and support the study of SUNY’s Open Education efforts. We provide consultation and research on the plethora of SUNY Open Educational efforts, with the aim of developing research that improves understanding and the practice of Open Education.
We believe there is a current opportunity to move beyond best practices and individual projects across SUNY Open Education. Education research has verified the value of evidence-based evidence for improving education (McMillan, 2012), and a number of researchers have studied how individual Open Education innovations have improved learning outcomes (Laman & Hilton, 2012; Fischer, Hilton, Robinson, & Wiley, 2015). However, there is little research on how Open Education can systematically change and improve institutions of higher education, and how benefits may be applied or “scaled up” system-wide.
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Research in the lab focuses on understanding how to support children’s early learning in ways that strengthen later mathematical development. The team identifies early skills that predict future math success and investigates how those skills emerge in early childhood. The lab also designs, tests and examines the effects of instructional materials and interventions intended to build those foundational skills.
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Leveraging artificial intelligence’s (AI) transformative potential in early childhood education (ECE), the PlayfulAI Learning and Design Lab focuses on fostering responsible, effective and equitable AI learning and tool design for young children (ages 5-8). The team is planning to integrate our ongoing and future research into three interconnected areas: (1) AI Literacies Framework and Experiences in ECE; (2) AI Literacies Curriculum and (3) Child-Centered AI Design.
In collaboration with community partners, the interdisciplinary team of researchers across ECE, AI and computing education strives to:
- Generate AI-powered innovations in child development, early education and child-center AI design
- Guide caregivers, educators and designers to support and prepare young children for AI-driven future; and
- Disseminate information to help public and policy makers make informed decisions and policies on AI in ECE
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The Buffalo Early Learning Lab seeks to understand how learners process the incredibly variable input they receive. In language learning, learners encounter input that varies along many dimensions. For example, words in the real world sound different every time they are produced, even when spoken by a single talker, and variability increases exponentially between different talkers. Further, linguistic input can vary when learners encounter different dialects or languages. Our research program explores how the processes and outcomes of learning are shaped by the inevitable variability in linguistic experience. We are always looking for more families to help us answer our questions. Please sign up for our database if you are interested in helping us understand how children learn.
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The Visualizing Brilliance for Equity in STEAM with Video (ViBES with Video) Lab advances equity and social justice in STEAM education by pioneering innovative methodologies with new forms of video recording technology. Tools and technologies for studying learning influence what can be seen and studied, and therefore have the power to center the voices and points of view of racially, linguistically and culturally diverse learners in dynamic and situated learning environments, disrupting past methodologies that privilege decontextualized, individualistic and logocentric views of what counts as learning.
ViBES with Video Lab will be the first of its kind to transform current approaches to STEAM educational research by:
- Building a culturally responsive and sustaining asset-based analytic framework for video research in partnership with communities and participants
- Expanding and developing our skills and foundations as researchers with new technologies and methodologies around this framework, and
- Sustaining this approach by apprenticing new researchers into this framework and seeking external funding. The lab will be supported in the future by a vibrant portfolio of individual and collaborative funded projects.
Meet the faculty involved with the lab: