A project being co-led by Beth Fields is focusing on the development of a home assessment tool to aid in modifying homes for people with disabilities.
Fields is an assistant professor of occupational therapy with the School of Education’s Department of Kinesiology. The research team also includes Jung-hye Shin, the principal investigator on the project, and Kevin Ponto, both associate professors with the School of Human Ecology’s Design Studies Department.
This work is being funded via a grant from the RRF Foundation for Aging. An executive summary for the project explains that most private homes are not designed to accommodate people with disabilities, and therefore a growing number of older adults are resorting to home modification to support their disabilities and allow them to age in place.
Ideally, home modifications would require a systematic home assessment by an occupational therapist or other trained professional. But a general lack of knowledge in this realm — or access to qualified professionals, particularly in rural areas — hinders this approach.
The new tool “will enable home assessments to be performed more effectively and more efficiently as well as asynchronously and remotely,” explains Fields.
“This work is critical to support the increasing number of individuals that have a desire to safely and independently age in place,” Fields adds.
Garbacz receives grant to probe family-school partnership intervention
Andy Garbacz received a multi-million dollar grant to further vital work that focuses on family, school, and community partnerships to promote family well-being and youth mental health.
Garbacz is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology who also serves as co-director of the School Mental Health Collaborative.
The award from the Institute of Education Sciences is for a five-year project that will test the efficacy of a family-school partnership intervention for elementary school students with social, emotional, or behavior concerns.
This project will conduct a systematic efficacy replication of a family-school partnership intervention, Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC). Systematic replication studies vary one or more aspects of a previous study to create a better understanding of interventions.
This research project will test CBC using school-based specialists as interventionists — instead of research personnel who were used in prior efficacy studies. Garbacz’s research team will examine the impact of the intervention on student behavior outcomes, parent- teacher relationships, and teacher practices.
The research will take place over the next five years in 60 elementary schools, with 720 students in kindergarten to fourth grade who have social, emotional, or behavior concerns enrolled in the study.
Around the School …
- Karla Ausderau, an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology, was awarded a COVID-19 Response Research and Education Award from the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the UW–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Her work will address significant health disparities and marginalization experienced by people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Brian Burt is the lead author of a paper published in the Teachers College Record that examines Black male graduate students’ advising experiences in engineering — with the researchers theorizing that more caring relationships could assist students in earning their degree. This work is important because it’s estimated that more than half of all students who begin pursuit of a graduate degree do not graduate with one. Burt is an associate professor with the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis.
- WIDA, an educational services organization within the UW–Madison School of Education, received $2.6 million from the U.S. Department of Education to launch Rural Educators Self-Reflecting and Practicing Equity-Centered Teaching with English Learners (Project RESPECT), a program that will help rural K-8 teachers provide effective and equitable literacy instruction for multilingual learners.