Valerie Shapiro named William T. Grant Foundation Scholar

From Berkeley Social Welfare | March 27, 2020

UC Berkeley professor of social welfare Valerie Shapiro has been named a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar. Shapiro's project will investigate the ways intermediary units (organizations whose work includes packaging and promoting research findings for practitioner use) contribute to an infrastructure for effective prevention practice. She will be working in partnership with UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center (GGSC), whose recently-launched website Greater Good in Education(link is external) distills research findings to promote the social, emotional, and ethical development of students and the well-being of the adults who work with them. However, the ability to study and improve these web-based interventions is hindered by a lack of techniques for measuring the actual use of research evidence that results from interactions with their website. Shapiro's project seeks to develop measures to describe the ways in which educators engage with research-brokering websites to acquire, assess, and appropriate research evidence; then test measurement validity; and finally provide measurement and interpretation protocols to an open-source repository and explore their transportability to other research-brokering organizations. Those interested in becoming involved with the project can start by registering online(link is external) as a Greater Good in Education website user.