Assistant Professor, Karen Thompson, was awarded the AERA Bilingual Education Research Special Interest Group 2014 Outstanding Dissertation Award at the AERA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Sunday, April 4.

The Outstanding Dissertation award is part of a competition open for recent and in-progress graduates, who earned or will earn a PhD or EdD degree between January 2012 and December 2013. The topic of the dissertation should be related to the area of bilingual education research, including work with any language-minority population and either qualitative or quantitative research methodology. The Dissertation Competition Committee will be comprised of researchers representing the broad areas of expertise within bilingual education research, and who are members in good standing of the Bilingual Education Research SIG. The criteria used for evaluating the applications submitted will center on the quality of the dissertation (rigor of methodology and theoretical and educationally applied contribution to the field), as well as the innovations generated by the research work.

Thompson’s dissertation is entitled “Are We There Yet? Exploring English Learners’ Journey to Reclassification and Beyond.”

Here’s a brief one-sentence summary of her dissertation below:

I use nine years of longitudinal, student-level data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, combined with interviews and observations from a cohort of San Francisco Bay Area students initially classified as English learners, to explore the time that English learners (ELs) take to acquire English proficiency, the factors that are related to students’ English acquisition trajectories, and the relationship between reclassification as proficient in English and later academic outcomes.

Congratulations to Karen Thompson on this outstanding achievement!