Ellis Alum Awarded MET Dissertation Fellowship

Ellis alumna Holland Banse ’06 has been awarded a $20,000 stipend through the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) MET Dissertation Fellowship Program to continue her research in the field of education. Holland is a pre-doctoral fellow in the Virginia Education Science Training (VEST) program supported by the Institute of Educational Sciences. 
After graduating from Georgetown University and teaching pre-kindergarten and kindergarten in Washington, D.C., Holland went on to get her PhD from the University of Virginia. Here, she focused her dissertation research on discovering what makes an effective and supportive classroom environment, specifically upper elementary school students who are Latino English language learners (ELL).
 
Using the AERA’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Longitudinal Database, she found that Latino ELL students’ personal characteristics were leveraged through their teachers being warm and supportive. In her preliminary findings, she found that effective teachers show care for their students in a variety of ways and praise students for their work.
 
Using funding from the AERA-MET Dissertation Fellowship Award, Holland hopes to learn if teachers are merging their warm and supportive interactions with content areas, specifically mathematics, an area proving to be challenging for Latino ELLs.
 
Holland hopes her research will help teachers with a high concentration of Latino ELL students, as well as provide them with concrete feedback on how to teach effectively. She also hopes to continue her work in the field of education and teach in higher education.
 
Read more about Holland's work here
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