Research Labs
The CARE Lab
We are a collaborative, interdisciplinary team of researchers, educators, postdoctoral scholars, doctoral students, and undergraduate students from the University of California, Davis. Our overarching goal is to improve the educational experiences of learners on the autism spectrum by understanding the dynamic and transactional relationship between students and their classroom environment. We started as a small research group in 2016, coding videos of autistic students and their teachers within general and special education classrooms.
Puertas Learning Lab
The Puertas Learning Lab advances
educational equity by bridging policy, practice, and research to
strengthen STEM and Social Studies learning for underserved
communities. Grounded in the UC Davis School of Education, we
focus on recruiting, preparing, and supporting K–12 educators,
with a particular emphasis on bilingual teachers. Our work spans
the full arc of the educator pipeline, from undergraduate future
teachers and paraprofessionals to inservice teachers.
Teachers as Learners (TAL)
Our project investigates teacher cognition and learning in two core practices of classroom communication: leading discussions and eliciting student thinking. The project explores secondary English as language-rich, and elementary science where literacy gets backgrounded but is essential to practice. We also focus on linguistically diverse learners and their communicative repertoires that may be leveraged for learning.