Our Work
Building Theory
Teachers Turning to Teachers: Teacherpreneurial Behaviors in Social Media
Kaitlin Torphy
Sihua Hu
Yuqing Liu
Zixi Chen
2020
Today, there is growing evidence that educators engage in social media and virtual social networks across formal and informal settings to direct the trajectory of their curriculum. Dive in here or read the published paper by the American Journal of Education, 124(4).
Educators Meet the Fifth Estate: The Role of Social Media in Teacher Training
Kaitlin Torphy
Corey Drake
2019
This paper examines teacher candidates’ reflections on engagement with and in social media as it relates to their professional preparation and understandings of teaching within 21st- century classrooms. Dive in here or read the published paper by Teachers College Record Year Book Issue, 121 (14).
Social Media, Who Cares? A Dialogue Between A Millenial and a Curmudgeon
Kenneth Frank
Kaitlin Torphy
Equal Authorship
2019
This is a dialogue between a curmudgeon and a millennial regarding the import of social media for education and for educational research. Dive in here with the working paper or read the published paper by Teachers College Record Year Book Issue, 121 (14).
A Roadmap for Incorporating Online Social Media in Education
Hamid Karimi
Tyler Derr
Kaitlin Torphy
Ken Frank
Jiliang Tang
2019
Thanks to the advancements in communication and online social media, there has been a surge of useful online educational resources across the Internet. Dive in here with the working paper or read the published paper by Teachers College Record Year Book Issue, 121(14).
Conceptualizing Virtual Instructional Resource Enactment in an Era of Greater Centralization, Specification of Quality Instructional Practices, and Proliferation of Instructional Resources
John Lane
Brian Boggs
Zixi Chen
Kaitlin T. Torphy
2019
This article conceptualizes the enactment of virtual instructional resources. Dive in here with the working paper or read the published paper by Teachers College Record Year Book Issue, 121 (14).
Social Media and Education: Curation within and Outside the Schoolhouse
Sihua Hu
Kaitlin T. Torphy
Equal Authorship
Education in the United States has witnessed many technological innovations rise and fall. Since the invention of the computer, human’s ability to access knowledge and analyze data has grown exponentially. Within schools, technology presents great potential for students and teachers. Dive in here with the working paper.
Characterizing Instructional Content
Culturally Relevant Curriculum Materials in the Age of Social Media and Curation
Sihua Hu
Kaitlin Torphy
Amanda Opperman
2019
Many educators across the United States are deeply committed to empowering students from various cultural backgrounds and facilitating the connection between students’ everyday life experiences and their formal schooling. Culturally relevant education seeks to address the needs of students with diverse languages, literacies, and cultural practices. Dive in here with the working paper or read the published paper by Teachers College Year Book Issue, 121(14).
What Do Teachers Share on Socialized Knowledge Communities? A Case of Pinterest
Sihua Hu
Kaitlin Torphy
Amanda Opperman
Kim Jansen
Yun-jia Lo
2018
The purpose of this paper is to examine early career teachers’ Socialized Knowledge Communities (SKCs) as they relate to the pursuit of mathematics knowledge and teaching. The authors investigate Pinterest, a living data archive, as an opportunity to view teachers’ sense-making and construction of instructional resources. Read the published paper by the Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 3(2).
Educational Research in the 21st Century: Leveraging Big Data to Explore Teachers' Professional Behavior and Educational Resources Accessed within Pinterest
Kaitlin Torphy
Hamid Karimi
Jiliang Tang
Ken Frank
Sihua Hu
Forthcoming in the Elementary School Journal
Pinterest, a virtual resource pool and facilitator of social networks and social capital within virtual spaces is one example of a new resource that has the potential to provide instructional resources and professional support to teachers and inform educational policy. However, in an era of big data metrics, researchers must find meaningful approaches to characterize resources accessed and shared.
Mapping Social Networks and
Influence
Examining the Virtual Diffusion of Educational Resources Across Teachers' Social Networks Over Time
Yuqing Liu*
Kaitlin Torphy*
Sihua Hu
Jiliang Tang
*Equal Authorship
2020
In a social continuum of fluid virtual and physical interactions (Supovitz, Daly, & del Fresno, 2015), notions of teacher social networks are no longer bounded by school building walls. Dive in here with the working paper or read the published paper by Teachers College Record, 122(6).
Sources of Professional Support: Patterns of Teachers' Curation of Instructional Resources in Social Media
Kaitlin Torphy
Yuqing Liu
Sihua Hu
Zixi Chen
2020
Teacherpreneurs are those individuals who seek out instructional resources to supplement and direct the trajectory of their classroom curriculum. This work examines what factors contribute to similarity across teachers in the spaces they choose to access and share educational resources. Dive in here with the working paper or read the published paper by the American Journal of Education, 126(4).
From Cloud to Classrooom: Mathematics Teachers' Enactment of Resources Accessed within Virtual Spaces
Sihua Hu
Kaitlin Torphy
Kim Jansen
John Lane
2020
In this article, the authors argue that teachers as professionals are increasingly turning to virtual spaces to solve problems facing them in everyday teaching. These practices, though not housed under a formal organizational structure like school or district, connect teachers to a larger Socialized Knowledge Community and a myriad of instructional resources online. Dive in here with the working paper or read the published paper by Teachers College Record, 122(6).
Teacher Connection in Online Social Media: Understanding and Prediction in Pinterest
Hamid Karimi
Kaitlin Torphy
Tyler Derr
Ken Frank
Jiliang Tang
2020
Increasingly many teachers are turning to online social media to supplement educational resources and meet students’ needs in the classrooms. The diffusion of information from online social media to the classroom is significantly faster than traditional curriculum-based approaches. However, this is contingent upon how well teachers across an online social media network are connected. Learn more, read the paper.
Understanding Relationships Between Instructional Curation and Student Success
Coupling the planning and understanding of teaching and education policy with the change in students’ proficiency over time, big data connected to administrative data provide an opportunity to examine rich data on school change and student success in a way never before achievable at scale.
Building a Nationally Representative Sample of Teachers Online and Offline: The Public Instructional Network of School Resources
Zixi Chen*
Kaitlin Torphy*
Hamid Karimi
Nicole Donzella
*Equal Authorship
Under Review
This paper explores educational applications in big data analysis. Integrating social media data on Pinterest with various other data including administrative and nationally available census datasets, we measure the mutuality between teachers’ curation behavior and their students’ needs as reflected within school and district ecosystems. Dive in here.
Towards Improving Sample Representativeness of Teachers on Online Social Media: A Case Study of Pinterest
Hamid Karimi
Tyler Derr
Kaitlin Torphy
Kenneth Frank
Jiliang Tang
Many teachers utilize online social media to supplement their students' needs and enhance their professional activities, curating millions of educational resources. In fact, during the Coronavirus pandemic, online curation of resources provides teachers a repository of materials to provide students in online space. Teachers' engagement online then provides the ability to learn more about how teachers are addressing students' learning needs and potentially improve the quality of the resources they share. Historically, to perform such a study, we often survey some teachers and then leverage their shared resources to investigate education-related research questions. However, this can lead to problems including sample representativeness where surveyed teachers may not be
representative of the population of teachers in social media. In this paper, we attempt to improve the sample representativeness of teachers on Pinterest. We survey 541 teachers in the United States as seed samples and then collect their online data and social connections on Pinterest. Then, we devise a heuristic that automatically identities other Pinterest accounts that are likely to be teachers thus improving the sample representativeness. Finally, we evaluate our heuristic with advanced machine
learning techniques. See the paper here.
Hear Hamid present our work on YouTube.
Examining Policy Impacts
The Impacts of the Common Core State Standards on Teachers Resource Seeking and Access on Pinterest
Kaitlin Torphy
Yuqing Liu
Sihua Hu
Jiliang Tang
Ken Frank
In preparation
The paper leverages innovative analytic techniques with new forms of data to study educational processes and/or their effects. In it, we conduct an interrupted time series to examine the impact of the Common Core State Standards on teachers’ resource seeking and access within Pinterest.
How Do Teachers Align their Curated Online Resources to the Common Core State Standards?
Sihua Hu
Kaitlin Torphy
Zixi Chen
Brendan Eagan
This paper examines a sample of early career teachers’ curation of curriculum materials within Pinterest during a time of national education policy reform—the adoption of the Common Core State Standards in the U.S. By aligning the content of the resources that teachers actively seek out online to the Common Core State Standards, we provide an account of the instructional resources accessed and shared as teachers make sense and
respond to the policy implementation. Dive in with the working paper.
Supporting Teacher Training and Development
Providing teachers and students in teacher training with the skills necessary to curate instructional curriculum is a primary focus for the Teachers in Social Media Project. We see teachers' curation of instruction and supplemental curriculum as an integrated whole within Socialized Knowledge Communities and their own school-based collegial networks.
A Reflection Guide to Instructional Curation of Virtual Resources: Developing Teachers Habits of Mind
Sihua Hu
Kaitlin Torphy
We piloted a Reflection Guide in Torphy & Drake (2019) that will support teachers' exploration of worthwhile mathematics instructional resources online. Check it out here.
Cutting Edge Quantitative and Computational Methods
for STEM Education Research
Kaitlin Torphy Knake
Kenneth Frank
Guanglei Hong
Stephen Raudenbush
Yanyan Sheng
The overall goal of this webinar is to inform participants of a wide range of significant research questions, data structures, and advanced analytic techniques in the context of theory-driven and data-informed rigorous empirical investigations of STEM education, especially concerning under-represented groups. Cutting-edge methods are essential to study student and teacher experiences with STEM education programs developed, implemented, and evaluated in a complex environment that outstrips what can be rendered by conventional statistical techniques. To illustrate major methodological considerations, instructors will use a stylized case that evaluates the potentially differential impacts of curricular innovations representing the Next Generation Scientific Standards (NGSS) on instructional practices, student engagement, and science achievement.
Key methodological issues will be discussed in six inter-related modules:
(1) Research Design
(2) Instrument Measurement
(3) Social network analysis
(4) Multilevel modeling
(5) Causal mediation analysis
(6) Computational methods
Participants are encouraged to visit https://voices.uchicago.edu/nsf-siarm/ for information about a 3-year training initiative led by the team of instructors.
Creating Systems of Sustainability: Four Focus Areas for the Future of PK-12 Open Educational Resources
ISTE and New America with contributions from Dr. Kaitlin Torphy, Dr. Emily Hodges, Dr. Marcia Mardis, Dr. Serena Salloum, Dr. Susanna Benko, & Rebecca Morales.
We know teachers' engagement in social media is not bounded to the Pinterest platform. The Open Educational Resource movement (OER) is an example of state and federal actors working toward distributed leadership in curricular curation and online engagement within schools. Moving away from written textbooks, OER provides districts the opportunity to localize and adapt curriculum to their state standards, and students interests. Read the full document here.