|
Dear POWER Members,
I hope your new year is off to a great start! I am honored to serve as your next POWER president and look forward to leading this group of amazing researchers. First, I want to thank our past president, Jill Pentimonti, for her fantastic leadership as POWER leveled up to being a fully functioning non-profit and began raising funds to keep POWER running and serve our members. I am grateful for the innovation and ingenuity of our executive team. Second, I want to share some updates from our Steering Committee meeting that occurred January 22, 2025. Our 2025 POWER focus is member engagement! To that end, your Steering Committee has plans for several virtual and in-person opportunities to network with members across the year. Here are a few ways to get engaged with POWER:
I am looking forward to a fabulous year connecting with and championing as many of you as possible. As we engage together, I hope you find what you need from your POWER Community! Cheers, Hope POWER President connect, support, advocate.
0 Comments
by Dr. Cheryl Varghese, PhD In April 2024, the Houston POWER Hub hosted a “speed dating” event that was attended by a group of education researchers across three different institutions. This was the second in-person event hosted since the formation of the Houston POWER Hub in 2020. Given the positive feedback about the event, we highlight three aspects of the event that worked well: 1. Opportunities for One-on-One Conversations We organized our networking event to follow a “speed dating” structure. We did this in hopes to (a) foster more meaningful connections with others, (b) lessen the discomfort that often arises from navigating networking events, and (c) help others meet new, unfamiliar people. This is a high-level overview of how we structured our event: Each attendee was given a number (1 or 2). Anybody assigned as a #1 had a fixed spot at a small table. 2s were “floaters” – that is they moved around to a different #1 seated at a table every 7-8 minutes. Over the span of an hour, we were able to complete about six to seven rounds. It is worth noting that some attendees expressed wanting more time to engage in conversations, but others enjoyed the 7-8 minute time length. We did our best to assign the same number to attendees from the same institution in order to increase chances of new meetings and collaborations. 2. Conversation Starters One of the things that makes social networking tough is starting a conversation that invites back-and-forth dialogue. At each table, we provided a list of *optional* conversation starters that included a mix of both personal and fun topics. Attendees were free to use or disregard the conversation starters based on their preferences. Here were some example conversation starters:
3. Diversified Research Interests/Specialization Attendees at the Houston POWER Hub event represented many different departments that intersect with education research – from STEM to language/literacy to neuroscience to communication sciences and disorders to early childhood education. In addition to a diverse set of research interests, attendees had different types of job positions. Some attendees had more traditional faculty positions, while others had positions at state agencies or research institutions. Attendees also included postdocs and doctoral students. The diversified research interests and job positions added different perspectives and voices to the conversations at the event. The Houston POWER Hub committee made intentional efforts to leverage personal and professional connections to advertise the event across and within departments. Ultimately, this helped to encourage attendance from a varied group of researchers. Author note: Cheryl Varghese, PhD is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Interventions, Texas State Initiatives at Children’s Learning Institute, McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Dear POWER,
I am writing as the current President of POWER with some exciting updates! I want to start off my note with a huge thank you to our two past Presidents, Emily Solari and Sara Hart, for all the amazing accomplishments they oversaw during their tenures, and for Hope Gerde stepping into the President Elect position, and Lori Skibbe now serving as VP of Finance. I’m going to start with the most exciting update - POWER is now officially a non-profit organization! Looking towards the future, we will be focused on the long-term health of POWER. Although we have no plans to have membership fees so that we can reach as many members as possible, we have set up a method to accept donations to support POWER. Donating is of course completely optional and at this point funds will go to keep POWER up and running. As donations grow, we will make additional plans for donated funds – if you have any ideas please feel free to reach out! To donate, all you have to do is click the DONATE button on the POWER website. We also now have POWER merch! The merch includes t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and tote bags - and the best part is a portion of the proceeds get donated to POWER. Visit the TeePublic website to order. I’ve purchased one of everything and love it all :). In the last two years, we have had additional exciting changes happen with POWER. We now have over 1000 members! We rolled out POWER Hubs, with the hope to bring more direct opportunities for connecting, supporting, and advocating to our membership. We have seen many of our members win awards, and just as importantly, members doing the hard task of asking to be nominated for awards or stepping up and nominating someone who was being missed. We have hosted numerous successful professional development and mentoring sessions. We continue to post new content to our resources page. We have hosted many virtual social events and in-person social events at conferences (so keep your eye out for information on events at upcoming conferences!). Our database continues to be a useful resource for finding collaborators, reviewers, nominees, and friends. Please use and recommend it to others. All of our committees have opportunities for new members to join to help serve POWER, so look out for a call coming soon for volunteers. Please feel free to use our listserv, you can email [email protected] to post. We welcome new Hub applications, if you see a need for community around a topic or geographical area. Recommend each other for opportunities! And as always, we are open to feedback from our members. Please continue to connect, support, and advocate for each other! Jill Pentimonti Nearly all award, job, or school applications require letters of support and these letters matter! Letters of support are used by review committees to authenticate nomination statements and learn about the exceptional qualifications of the nominee. These letters are highly valued as evidence of the extraordinary work of the applicant. In fact, I have experience in which revising only the letters of support from a previously non-winning application resulted in a win. Letters of support influence the outcome!
If these letters are so important, who should write these letters and how will you ask? When considering letter writers, it can be difficult to know where to begin. To enhance your likelihood of success, there are several criteria to consider before selecting a writer and making the ask! Who should write my letter of support? Identifying letter writers can be tricky business. While you may be able to think about many people who would say nice things about you (no you cannot ask your mom), there are several criteria to consider as you make your selection. 1) Is the person a previous recipient of the award or position? Previous winners of the award or position you are nominated for are highly regarded by the organization and committee bestowing this award. In addition, previous awardees will have particular insight into the organization that may impact how they frame their comments about you and your work. 2) Does this person meet the requirements of the award or position ? Awards may have specific requirements/recommendations for nominators or letter writers. The specific award application will provide guidance regarding your selection. For example, an award may require letters from students and faculty, practitioner collaborators, letters from outside of your institution, letters from organization members, or a letter from your direct supervisor or mentee. It is essential to have a letter reflecting each required person in the application materials. Even when not specifically required, selecting a diverse group of writers can ensure writers speak to different strengths of your work. For example, for a faculty position select letter writers to share about your research and teaching excellence. 3) Does this person meet the criteria of the award or position? Awards and positions always have specific criteria that characterizes an exemplary candidate. Successful applicants select letter writers who meet these criteria. If you are applying to a research award, select writers who are excellent researchers. If you are applying to a teaching award, select writers who are exceptional educators themselves. Often award or position applications require a statement about the qualifications or the CV of the letter writers in order to frame their letter within the context of their expertise. 3) Is the person well known in the field for the criteria? After you have identified writers who meet the award criteria, ask yourself, “Is this person the top in this field?” If the writer must be an organization member, ask yourself, “Is this person active in the organization?” Ask the most prominent, active, or senior person who knows your work well enough to speak candidly about it. 4) Does the person know your work well? It is important that your writers know your work well. Informed writers can better identify which of your amazing attributes to highlight for any specific award. They will have specific evidence to provide to support the arguments they make about your expertise and extraordinary contributions to the field. Pragmatically, someone who knows you may be more likely to find the time to write your letter of support. 5) Is the person a strong mentor or advocate? If the writer is a strong mentor or advocate they are likely to be more invested in writing your letter than otherwise. At minimum, they will likely complete your letter on time. How Do You Invite Letter Writers to Write for You? I am always asked, “How well do I need to know my letter writers?” The answer is, it depends. Some letter writers you might know very well. For example, the award criteria may lead you to select your graduate advisor, a peer colleague, a student or a mentee. For other awards or positions, you may have met your writer just a few times at a conference, but they are on the steering committee for the awarding agency or are top in the field making them an excellent selection. Proactively prepare for soliciting letter writers by intentionally meeting folks at a conference or when they visit your institution. Ask to be introduced so you can at least begin your request email with, “I enjoyed our conversation when we met at…” Whether you know your letter writers well or not, there are some important steps you should take when inviting letter writers to write for you.
Once I write my first letter of recommendation, I am very happy to revise it for a new award or position. Thus, feel free to ask your same letter writers for multiple letters if you are applying to multiple awards or positions and the letter writer meets the criteria. Below we provide some example emails requesting letters of support for awards or positions. We hope you find them to be useful model texts as you Make the Ask to Seal the Deal! Example emails: Example #1 (unfamiliar) Dear Dr. XXXXX It was a pleasure talking with you about XXXXXX when we met at XXXXX conference. I am writing to ask if you would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me for the XXXXXX award. I have included the criteria of the award here and hope you can speak to the importance of my research for under-resourced communities. I am attaching a draft letter for your convenience and my CV. The nomination package is due XXXX so please submit your signed letter on letterhead to XXXXXX at XXXXXXX.org. Please let me know if you are willing to submit a letter on my behalf. Sincerely, XXXXX I’m not sure where, but I recently read that writing letters of recommendation is “ubiquitous for academics or those following a research career.” Isn’t this the truth! It seems like a very short time ago that I was the student asking for a letter for graduate school or an award, but now, I am pretty consistently asked to write letters for students moving on in their academic careers. I know the weight that these letters can carry. I also know that I didn’t ever receive any sort of formal training or instruction on how to write an appropriate, impactful letter. If you are in the same boat, then you will love the series of posts that will be coming on our website over the next 6 months! Our first post, written by our very own Dr. Hope Gerde, focuses on how to ask for a letter of support. This post will be followed by one about writing letters of support for students for grad school and for faculty positions, with more to follow. We hope you find these helpful! Mindy Bridges Chair of the Professional Development Committee By: Dr. Beth Phillips and the Mentoring CommitteeHi again POWER, a friendly reminder about our exciting upcoming event with very special guests. This Group Discussion Event will be held on Wednesday September 29th from 1-2:30 (eastern time) via Zoom.
Discussion Breakout Rooms will include the following topics, each co-facilitated by our invited guests and members of the mentoring committee. Careers outside academia Supporting diverse mentees Promoting equity in research and dissemination Writing statements for tenure and promotion Invited guests who will be facilitating discussions include: Nicole Patton Terry -Florida State University Julia Mendez -University of North Carolina Greensboro Carola Oliva-Olson – SRI International Doré LaForett – Child Trends Each attendee will have the opportunity to participate in multiple extended discussions. To Register click HERE: https://fsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4HIflZkcXEKP34a Please feel free to forward this email to colleagues, peers, and friends—non-members and those considering joining POWER are more than welcome to attend! We hope this will be very well attended to show the power of POWER to our guests! We look forward to having you join us and our guests! By. Sara A. Hart, Ph.D. Many people are interested in preregistrations but are worried they don’t know how to do them or will do them wrong. What’s interesting about preregistrations is pretty much everyone who has been to graduate school has completed at least one preregistration: a prospectus! In your prospectus, you lay out your research questions, hypotheses, and plan for how you will collect and analyze your data, and often, you include a power analysis. Preregistration is when a researcher publicly posts their study plans before conducting the study, including aspects such as research questions, hypotheses, sampling plan, independent and dependent variables, and analysis plans. The preregistration is then posted openly on the Internet, with a timestamp, before the study is started.
You might have also heard of registered reports, which are a type of preregistration that occurs with peer-review. Many of our field’s journals now have registered reports (e.g., Journal of Educational Psychology, Developmental Science; a full list is https://cos.io/rr/). With a registered report, you write the introduction and the methods section, including the proposed analysis and power analysis (making them just like a prospectus), before conducting the study. You then submit this to a journal for Stage 1 review. Review then occurs normally but rather than being focused on the results, it’s focused on the importance of the research question and the proposed methods. If the journal accepts your Stage 1 manuscript, the journal accepts the paper “in principle.” Then, you go and complete the study, write up the remainder of the paper (not changing the introduction or methods other than tense changes), and submit it as a Stage 2 manuscript. At this stage, the reviewers are contacted again to make sure you followed your plan and that the results are appropriately discussed and reported. But a Stage 2 manuscript cannot be rejected *because* of the results, helping reduce publication bias and protecting you if you get null effects (which are unfortunately hard to publish normally). Preregistering your study has numerous benefits. First, you might be required to do it if you are a federally funded investigator (it is one of the SEER principles!). Second, preregistration makes your a priori hypotheses clear, allowing you to differentiate between confirmatory and exploratory analyses. Third, preregistration reduces questionable research practices, such as peeking at data, selective reporting (e.g., looking for an effect over many related outcome variables and selecting to publish the one that was statistically significant only), HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results Known), p-hacking, and the like. Fourth, when you do a registered report, you get the benefit of additional smart people working through your research questions and methods with you, increasing the chance of useful reviewer comments that improve your science. Are you interested in trying out a preregistration? Any type of study can be preregistered, including secondary data analyses, reviews, and qualitative work. Fortunately, there is a growing repository of templates you can fill out to help you complete your preregistration. Before starting, try to Google and see if you can find a template to help guide you through the process. I’ve also found other people’s preregistrations and used them as templates when I couldn’t find a standard one. A very handy list of templates that might help you is available https://osf.io/zab38/wiki/home/, and for meta-analysis, check out https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/ (which walks you through questions and then posts your preregistration in one place). Complete your preregistration, and then post it anywhere that will time stamp your document, and hopefully give you a DOI, making it citable. I’ve used OSF (https://help.osf.io/hc/en-us/articles/360019738834-Create-a-Preregistration), figshare (https://figshare.com/), Prospero (linked above), Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) (https://sreereg.icpsr.umich.edu), and AsPredicted (www.aspredicted.org). Then write up your study, using your preregistration as your guide for your analyses! If you’ve made a mistake with your preregistration, just note in your manuscript what is not preregistered and continue on your way. My own experiences with preregistrations have been mostly positive. When doing them, it feels as though you are slowing your research process and that can be frustrating. It frontloads a lot of work which we normally reserve for later, and it means a study is not “starting.” But when it comes time to write up the study paper, writing the methods and results is a breeze. I’ve also found that it really can be remarkable how reflecting on your analysis steps can be refreshing, especially firmly being able to differentiate between exploratory and confirmatory analyses. Preregistering every part of your analysis plan can be very difficult, especially for complex analyses. I have a preregistered paper published where I laid out a plan for if my variables were skewed but forgot to give a plan for if they were kurtotic! All I did was simply say explicitly in the paper that I didn’t preregister what I would do, but that I would follow my plan for if I had had skewed data (which fortunately worked to correct my kurtotic variable). I have also found that a preregistration can protect you during the review process from reviewers who want to change your paper with analyses you didn’t plan to do. In a different era, I might have felt tempted to work them into the manuscript, and maybe try to tell a story about why they were there. Now, I can either point to my preregistration and say that those analyses are not part of this study, or I can do the analyses, clearly label it as exploratory (and I’ve even explicitly said that a reviewer requested it in the text!), and just leave it there, not woven into the story. I encourage you to try out doing a preregistration. It will not be as foreign as you might think before doing your first one. It is the same research process you are used to, just in a different order than you are used to. More resources on preregistrations, and open science more broadly: van Dijk, W., Schatschneider, C., & Hart, S.A. (2021). Open science in education sciences. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 54(2), 139-152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420945267 Cook, B.G., Fleming, J.I., Hart, S.A., Lane, K.L., Therrien, W., van Dijk, W., Wilson, S. (in press). A how-to guide for open-science practices in special education research. Remedial and Special Education. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/07419325211019100 (open access version, https://edarxiv.org/zmeba/) In January 2021, The POWER Mentoring Committee hosted a wonderful discussion with one of our dynamic Ambassadors, Dr. Shelley Gray, about mentoring students and junior colleagues. Dr. Gray shared excellent advice regarding how to structure mentoring relationships in ways that are beneficial to both the mentor and the mentee. POWER members engaged in a robust discussion about the challenges and satisfactions of mentoring. Dr. Gray has provided us with the slides from this event with us, so the larger community can benefit from her guidance. We share them with you all here: |
Categories
All
Archives
February 2025
|
