AERA 2019: Toronto

Despite the massive attendance and endless relevant sessions, I believe that I had a productive time at the AERA conference this year. My objectives were to reconnect with colleagues, meet new ones, and learn more about some of my areas of interest. Here are the highlights in chronological order:

1. Because I have a dataset of college students, a subsample of which were in gifted and talented programs, I attended a session on the Gifted after K-12. I learned about some really neat opportunities out of the University of Washington which allows students to skip high school all together with other options involving only 2 years of high school. This was personally interesting to me because I decided to leave after 3 years of high school and my school counselor tried to discourage me (and my mom) because it limits the options of universities (no Ivy League). At any rate, there are pros and cons to these programs, as evidenced by researchers at UW and even Dr. Mammadov at VSU. I hope to discuss a future collaboration with him to analyze my own data. 
2. The next day I attended a roundtable on supporting Black education. This session was an open discussion on issues surrounding community-university partnerships. Many things came up that I could relate to, given it took me almost four years to get more involved in the schools around VSU. Something that I actually felt I could help with concerns the support of Black female preservice teachers who many times are shadowing white teachers in their placements. Vsu already has a Future Black Educators chapter which is comprised of two subgroups based on gender. I have already reached out to them and they are very interested in starting a support group in conjunction with a neighboring institution over Skype!
3. At my own presentation I got to interact with other scholars from China and Canada. From our conversations I have learned a lot. For example, in relation to my work on parental separation we discussed children left behind in rural communities in China when parents seek jobs in the cities. I also learned that in China even elementary schools are departmentalized meaning that children have a separate math, science, language, and history teacher in addition to a class "Mom" teacher. In Canada immigrants are called newcomers and teachers are needing the training to work with English language learners more than ever with Arabic being the first language of the most newcomers. 
4. One of my most favorite group of academics met Sunday night at the Teaching Psychology Special Interest Group (SIG) business meeting. We are looking for members if you would like to learn more about effective ways to teach and learn educational psychology! This SIG is sponsoring a 6-volume book series on educational psychology topics starting with assessment and motivation. This is a possible venue for future research. 
5. Monday morning I got to meet the chief editor of The Urban Review for which I have been reviewing manuscripts this year. I proposed a special issue topic that highlights the similarities and differences between urban and rural educational experiences. 
6. Later that day I attended a session on big data. In particular, I was interested in a meta-analysis on a flipped classroom. This is a technique I am experimenting with this semester and I wanted the scoop. The good news is that overall this technique has a significant effect in K-12 samples. However, there was evidence of publication bias meaning that significant findings were more likely to be published. I guess I will have to look into whether or not these findings translate to higher education. 

Like any good conference, I left with more questions and ideas than answers.