When Norma Chang arrived at Harvard as chemistry major in 1990, she realized that her secondary education just didn't cut it. She was presented with math and science problems that were much more open-ended than what she'd been used to in high school.
"Of course there's going to be a gap," she says. "But I kept wondering what could have been done differently in high school so that I didn't feel like I had to leap across a chasm when I got to college." She soon added education courses to her load. "I wanted to do something to improve the educational system."
After graduating and then teaching math and science for a few years to high-school students, Chang decided to pursue educational research to try and close that chasm she had experienced. She chose Carnegie Mellon's doctoral program in cognitive psychology where she could conduct psychological research and apply it to education. "It's hard to find those two components in balance," she says.
In her third year of study, Chang was accepted into the University's federally-funded Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER), which involves cognitive science students from the Departments of Psychology, Philosophy, Statistics, the Human Computer Interaction Institute, and the Robotics Institute.
"Through PIER, I realized my research was relevant to other disciplines, as well," she says.
The interdisciplinary approach has received national recognition recently. Academic Analytics' Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index ranked Carnegie Mellon's cognitive psychology faculty first among doctoral programs nationwide. The ranking–established through collaboration between faculty and researchers at Stony Brook University and Educational Directories Unlimited–is based on the number of published books and journal articles, journal citations, awards, honors, and grants received. Overall, the University's faculty placed sixth among large research universities
Today Chang (H'06) is narrowing the chasm between high school and college problem solving as a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley.
Editor's Note: Learn more about PIER in the CMT November 2005 cover story: Transforming America's Schools
