Congratulations to Nathan Hawk, a member of the Research Laboratory for Digital Learning and a PhD candidate in the learning technologies program at The Ohio State University. He has received an award from the Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship program – an annual highly competitive program that is eligible to any graduate student across the university’s colleges. The grants “support the research and scholarship of doctoral or terminal master’s degree candidates for their dissertations or theses.”
Nathan’s research interest resides in the intersection of learning technologies and mathematics learning, particularly at the K-12 level. In his dissertation research, he plans to identify malleable personal factors that influence the success of academically at-risk students in online charter schools. He conducts his research in the learning context of one online charter high school, with a focus on examining Algebra 1 nontraditional, at-risk students.
The dissertation study addresses critical issues. First, students with more maladaptive profiles of risk factors often have lower academic performance. These risk factors involve typically prior experiences or family-focused factors that are often uncontrolled by students and cannot easily be changed. Nathan’s study moves beyond these traditional risk factors and identifies important personal factors such as self-efficacy that can be changed with educational interventions. His study results will inform the design of educational programs that would help those academically at-risk students to become more self-efficacious and successful in school. Second, Nathan’s dissertation study addresses critical issues in a unique and important context – an online virtual school. His research is very important, relevant, and timely, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic where many K-12 schools across the United States have transitioned to virtual and remote format. Third, Nathan’s dissertation study is interdisciplinary across the fields of educational psychology, online learning, and mathematics education. His study leverages the theories in these fields and makes unique contributions to these fields. His study would inform the design of learning strategies in online mathematics education for non-traditional and traditionally underrepresented students.
Professionally, Nathan has over 15 years of experience in K-12 education as a high school mathematics teacher in highly diverse school populations serving underserved students. During that time, he has worked in both urban and rural educational settings. His primary experience has been working with nontraditional, at-risk students in public charter schools. Primarily, these schools have offered distance education course offerings for students to earn their high school diploma. Additionally, Nathan has served as a mathematics coach to improve both content and pedagogy skills for colleagues. In his current position, Nathan also serves as an instructional technology support coach and co-leader of his district’s teacher-based team professional development programming. Nathan also has multiple semesters of experience teaching undergraduate students and will serve as an adjunct faculty member to teach a graduate-level course in a university’s instructional design and technology program this coming semester.
Nathan has been active in other research projects within the Research Laboratory for Digital Learning including those resulting from K-12 school partnerships. Additionally, Nathan has been active in disseminating research with his peers in several high-impact peer-reviewed academic journals. He has published six articles, book chapters or reports, and three lead author projects are currently in review or final draft status. Nathan has also been an active participant as a presenter, reviewer, volunteer and session chair at state, national and international conferences, and serves as a peer reviewer for academic journals.
Nathan has won multiple awards for his educational technology projects or research. Along with his peer, he won the Best Paper Award from the Technology as an Agent for Change in Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group within American Educational Research Association, where he was also a nominee for the same award on another coauthored work. Additionally, he was a finalist for the The Richard C. Anderson Graduate Student Research Award by the National Consortium for Instruction and Cognition, for which he is a member. He also was awarded The Jere Trout Memorial Award for Excellence in Educational Technology Leadership by The George Washington University.