Alum Receives NSF CAREER Award

Katie Davis, Ed.D.'11, recently received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Davis, currently an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School, researches the role of digital media technologies in teens' lives.

While at HGSE, Davis worked closely with Professor Howard Gardner and co-authored The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World with him.

“Katie was an outstanding master’s and doctoral student, valued by both peers and faculty,” Gardner said, reflecting on his work with her to study how young people are affected by digital media. “Following her receipt of a doctoral degree from HGSE, she joined the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle. Katie has already received many grants and honors, for her research and teaching, culminating in the great honor of a Career Award from the National Science Foundation. This award, coveted across the sciences, is a special achievement for graduates of schools of education.”

Project Zero Research Director Carrie James echoed Gardner’s sentiments. “Katie was an indispensable contributor to our Good Play Project, in which we explored young people’s ethical sensibilities towards the internet,” James said. “She also played a seminal role in our research on young people’s sense of trust and trustworthiness. Overall, Katie is an outstanding thinker and researcher, whose ideas really shaped the evolution of our work.”

The CAREER award will provide Davis $759,462 over five years to investigate how networked technologies can be leveraged to develop learners' STEM identities and connect their STEM learning across informal and formal contexts. The project, "Digital Badges for STEM Education," will develop and implement a digital badge system to recognize and reward the skills and achievements of a diverse group of high school students participating in a science-based afterschool program at Seattle's Pacific Science Center.

This work aims to develop strong STEM identities among students who are currently underrepresented in STEM subject areas and encourage these students to pursue future STEM learning and career opportunities. The research findings will be used to develop educational outreach initiatives, distributed widely, to support other formal and informal learning institutions in their use of digital badges to support STEM learning.