Laura D'Amico
Research Associate and Adjunct Professor
Faculty of Education
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6
CANADA

Hours: 9:30 am – 2:30 pm

ldamico@sfu.ca
778-782-667

SFU | Faculty of Education

(last updated: December, 2007)

EDUCATION

Ph.D. (June 1999), Learning Sciences program (LS), School of Education and Social Policy (SESP), Northwestern University (NWU)
B.S. Education-Mathematics (May 1990), School of Education (SOE), University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison);

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Study of systems useful for supporting and implementing educational improvement and reform, including: assessment infrastructures; learning technologies; professional development systems for teachers and principals; and relationships between researchers and pracitioners.

CURRENT PROJECTS

A Sociocultural investigation of Literacy Instruction for Children Learning English as a Second Language (SILICLE)
SILICLE is a three year longitudinal study (2006-2009) of English langauge learners as they move through grades 4, 5 and 6. The project team is investigating the first language and English literacy practices of these students at home and in school and the ways in which they participate in those practices, the ways in which school literacy instruction based on sociocultural learning theories might provide these students with access to school literacy practices, and the extent to which theoretical models of and/or practical research on sociocultural approaches to literacy instruction for second language learners might be helpful to teachers working in multilingual classrooms. Some of the instructional innovations experiented with by the teachers participating in the study thus far have included: students investigating examples of literacy and literate activity in their homes and communities; students creating photo slideshows to represent their lives; students creating videos to introduce new students to their school and surrounding communites; and students creating PodCasts of stories they have written from wordless picture books.

Current Trends in the Evolution of School Personnel in Canadian Elementary and Secondary Schools
The School Personnel Study is five year investigation (2002-2007) involving researchers across Canada in an effort to understand the effects of budget cuts, class sizes, curriculum changes, and technological and educational reforms on teaching and learning conditions in Canadian public schools. I am working with a team based at Simon Fraser University to investigate these conditions in schools and classrooms in the greater Vancouver area. As of the 2006-07 school year, this project is in its final analysis and writing stage.

Grimmett, P. P., Dagenais, D., Jacquet, M., D’Amico, L., Ilieva, R. & Waldern, B. (in press). The contrasting discourses in the professional lives of educators in Vancouver, British Columbia. Journal of Educational Change.

D’Amico, L. & Riopel, M. C. (2005, May). The existence and focus of professional community in schools across Canada. A paper presented in Exploring the State of Professional Community in Canadian Schools, a symposium at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, May 28-31, 2005, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

PREVIOUS PROJECTS

Case study of LeTUS for the Research Network on Teaching and Learning Meta-Study
The Meta-Study is "investigating strategies for improving educational research to make it more useful and usable to educational practioners and policy makers." It is doing so by "systematically investigating qualities of recent projets that reconceptualized and reorganized the role of research vis-a-vis practice in ways that may have led to improved practice and increased student learning outcomes." As part of this endeavor, I wrote a case study of the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schoos (LeTUS). (Research consultant, 2003-2005)

Final full case study of LeTUS — full interpretive case (116 pages, 1.85MB)
[Note: The full case was initially made available in July, 2005. Minor edits were made in December 2005 and the cleaned up version was released in January 2006 ...And then we found a few more typos which we fixed in May 2006.]

Assessment and Technology Study
I devleoped a questionnaire to capture the ways in which technology use affects teachers assessment practices. This questionnaire was used as part of program evaluation efforts by the Integrating Strategies and Technology in Education Practice (InSTEP™) Project of the Center for Educational Technologies in Wheeling, West Virginia in Summer 2003. InSTEP was a multi-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Education focused on training West Virginia teachers in problem-based/inquiry learning and effective integration of technology into teaching and leanring. (Research consultant, 2003).

The High Performance Learning Communities Project (HPLC)
Based out of the Learning Research and Development Center of the University of Pittsburgh, HPLC investigated the efforts of New York City's Community School District #2 in Manhattan to produce district wide improvements in teaching and learning in literacy and mathematics. Technical reports and conference papers available on the HPLC website. (Post-doctoral researcher, 1997-2001)

Stein, M. K. & D'Amico, L. (2002). The District as a Professional Learning Laboratory. In A. M. Hightower, M. S. Knapp, J. A. Marsh & M. W. McLaughlin (Eds.), School Districts and Instructional Renewal. New York: Teachers College Press, p. 61-75.

Stein, M. K. & D'Amico, L. (2002). Inquiry at the Crossroads of Policy and Learning: A Study of a District-Wide Literacy Initiative. Teachers College Record, 104(7).

The Learning through Collaborative Visualization Project (CoVis)
Run out of Northwestern University, CoVis was a collaboration between researchers and nearly 150 teachers in 40 schools across the country to implement project based science supported by computing and telecommunications technology into earth and environmental science classes. Research papers and teaching materials available at the CoVis website. (Graduate Student, 1992-1997)

D'Amico, L. (April, 1999). The implications of project-based pedagogy for the classroom assessment infrastructures of science teachers. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 19-23, 1999, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (This paper is a rough summary of my dissertation. [132K]).

D'Amico, L. (1999). The role of classroom assessment infrastructures in crafting project based science classrooms. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (main document [420K]; appendices [188K]) .