Graduate Employee Josh Kahn Receives Betty Foster McCue Scholarship

Graduate Employee Josh Kahn Receives Betty Foster McCue Scholarship

April 2017

BRT Graduate Employee Josh Kahn was recently awarded a Betty Foster McCue Scholarship by the University of Oregon Graduate School. This award recognizes doctoral candidates in the final year of their doctoral programs whose dissertations focus on topics related to human development and performance.

Josh’s dissertation focuses on the development and validation of a measure of Administrative Decision-Making in Student Discipline (ADMin-SD). Previous research has demonstrated that students are not disciplined equitably, with Black students facing harsher consequences for similar infractions compared to their White counterparts. Currently, no measures exists to evaluate whether training programs or interventions can improve administrators’ decision-making skills related to student discipline. ADMin-SD, a test of an administrator’s ability to make effective, efficient, and equitable decisions in student discipline situations, can be used by both practitioners (e.g., district administrators’ evaluation of principals’ need for further professional development) and researchers (e.g., to study how and why principals make decisions in student discipline situations). ADMin-SD will allow the field to begin developing and testing interventions with the ultimate goal of helping improve administrators’ decision-making skills.

Josh began his doctoral studies at the University of Oregon in the fall of 2011 and is currently finishing his second year as a graduate employee at BRT, where he has been an integral part of Dr. Joseph F. T. Nese’s Project CORE, Computerized Oral Reading Fluency Evaluation, a four-year research project funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (R305A140203). Josh’s work on Project CORE has included coordinating data collection efforts in the schools as well as managing and analyzing project data and assisting in dissemination of results.

Prior to joining BRT, Josh worked as a middle school English teacher and a special education teacher at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. He has experience working with students with both high- and low-incidence disabilities. He received his M.S.Ed in Elementary Education from Mercy College as part of his participation in the New York City Teaching Fellows, where he taught special education in the Bronx, NY.
Josh’s primary research interests include:
1. teacher instructional decision-making,
2. applying insights from cognitive psychology to administrative decision-making, and
3. leveraging various problem-solving models.

Josh expects to defend his dissertation by winter of 2018 and will begin teaching as an adjunct member of the Moravian College faculty in Pennsylvania in the fall.

Congratulations on a well-deserved award, Josh!