The National Academies

Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Education

Research on 21^st Century Competencies:
An NRC Planning Process on Behalf of the Hewlett Foundation

February 1, 2010

Biographical Sketches of Meeting Attendees

James W. Pellegrino (Chair) is liberal arts and sciences distinguished professor and distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is co-director of UIC’s interdisciplinary Learning Sciences Research Institute. Dr. Pellegrino’s current work is focused on analyses of complex learning and instructional environments, including those incorporating powerful information technology tools, with the goal of better understanding. A special concern of his research is the incorporation of effective formative assessment practices, assisted by technology, to maximize student learning and understanding. Dr. Pellegrino has served on the NRC Board on Testing and Assessment, which issued the report Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. He recently helped the College Board build new frameworks for curriculum, instruction, assessment and professional development in AP Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Environmental Science. Dr. Pellegrino earned his B.A. in psychology from Colgate University, Hamilton, New York and both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado.

Patricia A. Alexander is the Jean Mullan Professor of Literacy and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the Department of Human Development at the University of Maryland. She has served as President of Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association, and as Vice-President of Division C (Learning and Instruction) of the American Educational Research Association. A former middle-school teacher, Dr. Alexander received her reading specialist degree from James Madison University (1979) and her Ph.D. in reading from the University of Maryland (1981). Since receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Alexander has published over 200 articles, books, or chapters in the area of learning and instruction. She has also presented over 200 papers or invited addresses at national and international conferences. Currently, she serves as the editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology, Associate Editor of American Educational Research Journal-Teaching, Learning, and Human Development, and on 12 editorial boards including those for Journal of Literacy Research, Educational Psychologist, and the Journal of Educational Psychology. Among her many honors and awards, Dr. Alexander is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and was a Spencer Fellow of the National Academy of Education. She was named one of the 10 most productive scholars in Educational Psychology, and was the 2001 recipient of the Oscar S. Causey Award for outstanding contributions to literacy research from the National Reading Conference. She is also the 2006 recipient of the E. L. Thorndike Award for Career Achievement in Educational Psychology from APA Division 15 and the 2007 recipient of the Sylvia Scribner Award from AERA Division C. In addition, she has received various national, university, and college awards for teaching.

Judd Boomhower is Associate Project Manager at Redstone Strategy, LLC. Since joining Redstone in 2007, Judd has led project work in domestic and international conservation, education, population, and reproductive health and rights. Before joining Redstone, Judd was a Fulbright Scholar in Venezuela's Los Roques Archipelago National Park, where he studied the ecology of coral reef fishes. Previous to his Fulbright experience, he was a research fellow at Environmental Defense, where he analyzed marine conservation issues in U.S. fisheries. Judd has a BA and an MS from Stanford University. His undergraduate thesis resulted in a method to quantify the success of Costa Rica's Payments for Environmental Services Program in reducing deforestation, and has been published in the journal Conservation Biology. At Stanford Judd was the recipient of the Lokey Stanford Environmental Fellowship and played for the national-championship-winning men's ultimate Frisbee team. He is fluent in Spanish.

Wayne F. Cascio holds the Robert H. Reynolds Chair in Global Leadership at the University of Colorado Denver. He has served as president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (1992-1993), Chair of the SHRM Foundation (2007), the HR Division of the Academy of Management (1984), and as a member of the Academy of Management’s Board of Governors (2003-2006). He has authored or edited 22 books on human resource management, including Investing in People (with John Boudreau, 2008), Managing Human Resources (8^th ed., 2009), and Applied Psychology in Human Resource Management (7^th ed., with Herman Aguinis, 2010). He is a two-time winner of the best-paper award from the Academy of Management Executive for his research on downsizing and responsible restructuring. In 1999 he received the Distinguished Career award from the HR Division of the Academy of Management. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in 2004, and in 2008 he was named by the Journal of Management as one of the most influential scholars in management in the past 25 years. Dr. Cascio has consulted with more than 200 organizations on six continents and is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources, the Academy of Management, and the American Psychological Association. Currently he serves as editor of the Journal of World Business.

Barbara Chow began her term as the Education Program director with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the fall of 2008, coming from the House Budget Committee where she served as policy director. From 2001-2007 she was the executive director of the National Geographic Education Foundation and vice president for education and children's programs at National Geographic. Barbara served in both terms of the Clinton administration. From 1993 to 1997, she was a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, acting as White House liaison to Congress on economic, budget, and appropriation matters. From 1997 to 2001, Barbara worked in the Office of Management and Budget, where she was the program associate director for education, income maintenance, and labor. Starting in 2000, she kept the OMB position and added the position of deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Earlier in her career, she worked as a member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, as staff member of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee specializing in energy and natural resource issues, and as a manager of federal budget policy at Price Waterhouse. She also served on two presidential transition teams – in 1992 for President-elect Clinton and in 2008 for President-elect Obama. Barbara served as a member of the board of Grantmakers for Education from 2001 to 2006, the last two years as co-chair and then chairperson; as ex-officio board member of the National Environmental Education Foundation from 2004 to 2006; and as a member of the steering committee of the Geography Education National Implementation Plan from 2001 to 2006. Raised in Fullerton, California, Barbara has a bachelor's degree in government from Pomona College and a master's degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

J. Douglas Coatsworth is associate professor of Human Development and Family Studies at The Pennsylvania State University with an appointment in the Penn State Prevention Center for the Promotion of Human Development. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Minnesota and was a post-doctoral fellow in Prevention Science at Arizona State University. His research has investigated the concepts of risk, resilience and competence in families and individual development and he has applied this understanding toward constructing and evaluating intervention programs to prevent problem behavior and promote well-being in families and youth. Since graduate school he has been involved in Project Competence, a longitudinal study of children and families that investigated questions about the development of competencies and resilience and how early competencies predict to later happiness, adjustment and life success. His current research focuses primarily on studying family-based interventions to prevent substance use problems in adolescents.

Stuart W. Elliott is director of the Board on Testing and Assessment at the National Research Council, where he has worked on a variety of projects related to education assessment, accountability, standards, teacher qualifications, and information technology. Previously, he worked as an economic consultant for several private-sector consulting firms. He was also a research fellow in cognitive psychology and economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

David Finegold is Dean of Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR). He is a leading expert on skill development systems and their relationship to economic performance and corporate governance. Since arriving at Rutgers in 2006, Dean Finegold has spearheaded efforts to build a workforce development system for New Jersey’s bioscience sector and to create a new statewide professional science master’s (PSM) program. Prior to joining Rutgers he was a professor at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont, CA, where he helped to build the first college devoted specifically to creating a PSM program. He is the author of more than 80 journal articles and book chapters and has written or edited six books, including Are Skills the Answer? (with Colin Crouch and Mari Sako), Corporate Boards: Adding Value at the Top (with Jay Conger and Ed Lawler) and BioIndustry Ethics (Elsevier Academic Press, 2005). He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Social Studies, from Harvard University in 1985, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he completed his DPhil in Politics in 1992.

Bruce A. Fuchs is currently the Director of the NIH Office of Science Education. Dr. Fuchs monitors a range of science education policy issues and provides advice to NIH leadership. He also directs the creation of a series of K-12 science education curriculum supplements that highlight the medical research findings of the NIH. The NIH Curriculum Supplement Series is designed to meet teacher’s educational goals as outlined in the National Science Education Standards and is available free to teachers across the nation. The office also actively creates innovative science and career education Web resources (http://science.education.nih.gov) which are accessible to teachers and students across the nation. Dr. Fuchs is currently serving on both the Innovation and Competitiveness and the Education Subcommittees of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). Dr. Fuchs also served on working groups of the Department of Education’s Academic Competitiveness Council (ACC). He was a member of the K-12 education focus group for the National Academy of Science’s report Rising Above the Gathering Storm. Prior to coming to NIH, Dr. Fuchs—an immunologist who did research on the interaction between the brain and the immune system—was a researcher and teacher on the faculty of the Medical College of Virginia. He had grant support from both the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He has a B.S. in Biology from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Immunology from Indiana State University. He was born and raised in Springfield, Illinois.

Lisa García Bedolla is Associate Professor of Education and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and her B.A. in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) which won the American Political Science Association’s Ralph Bunche Award for the best book in political science on ethnic and cultural pluralism and a best book award from the American Political Science Association’s Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section. She is also author of Latino Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, Latino Studies, American Politics Research, the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and in numerous edited volumes. She has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures, the James Irvine Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the American Political Science Association. Her research focuses on the civic engagement of Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender.

Lee Green is Senior Project Manager at Redstone Strategy LLC. Since joining Redstone in 2005, Lee has helped many philanthropic programs increase the outcome orientation of their strategies and grant making. He has led projects in conservation, energy and climate, education, population, and reproductive health and rights, helping philanthropic programs and NGOs develop or refine their strategic plans and communicate the results of these efforts to their colleagues and their boards. Prior to joining Redstone, Lee was a consultant for four years at a firm founded by former Monitor Consulting partners, where he specialized in increasing client profitability through customer behavior analysis. Lee’s work included expected value analysis, financial modeling, and scenario-based modeling, such as spectrum valuation modeling for wireless operators in preparation for wireless spectrum auctions. Lee received his MBA from the Yale School of Management and graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a BA in economics. While in business school Lee served as a Teaching Assistant for three courses: Decision Analysis and Game Theory; Hypothesis Testing and Regression; and Nonprofit Entrepreneurship. At Harvard, Lee was awarded a Harvard College Scholarship for academic excellence.

Margaret Hilton is senior program officer of the Center for Education in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. She recently directed a study that reviewed the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) data base. In early 2009, she directed a workshop on science education and 21st century skills, building on an earlier workshop which considered the available research on future skill demands. She has directed and contributed to studies of high school science laboratories, the role of state standards in K-12 education, foreign language and international studies in higher education, international labor standards, and the information technology workforce. Prior to joining the National Research Council, Hilton was a consultant to the National Skill Standards Board. Earlier, at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, she directed studies of workforce training, work reorganization, and international competitiveness. She has a B.A. in geography (with high honors) from the University of Michigan, a master of regional planning degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a master of human resource development degree from the George Washington University.

Nathan Huttner is an Associate at Redstone Strategy, LLC. Nathan joined Redstone after completing his MBA at the Yale School of Management where he was a Silver Anniversary Scholar and received nineteen academic distinctions in his two years. He was also teaching assistant in Yale’s course on competitive strategy and its course on innovation. Prior to Yale Nathan was an associate at Katzenbach Partners, a strategy consulting firm founded by former partners of McKinsey and Company. At Katzenbach he served clients in the energy and pharmaceuticals industries on issues of strategy and organization, including extensive analysis of energy supply and marketing. Nathan received his BA magna cum laude and with distinction in economics from Yale College, focusing his studies on international economics and economic development. He was executive director during his senior year of the Elmseed Enterprise Fund, a student-run micro lender, and he now serves on the board of directors.

Kristi Kimball is a Program Officer in the Education Program of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Her focus is on grants that advance statewide policy reform in California. Kristi's background includes serving in the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton Administration, where she worked on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, school construction and modernization, charter schools and school choice issues. She also worked as a Research Associate at the Urban Institute, where she helped evaluate national progress in implementing standards-based reform, and as an education staffer on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Most recently, Kristi worked on state legislation and local policy reforms related to smart growth as the California Deputy Director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project. Kristi holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College, and an M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Patrick C. Kyllonen is the director of the Center of New Constructs at Educational Testing Service (ETS), Princeton, NJ. Before coming to ETS, he was a faculty member at the University of Georgia, and director of the cognitive performance division of the Air Force Research Laboratory. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including one from the technical cooperation program for the design, development, and evaluation of the trait-self-description (personality) inventory for use in 5 countries, has served on the board of several journals, has been a regular reviewer for NSF, IES, and other agencies, and is a fellow of Division 15 of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Kyllonen is known for his work on the measurement of human abilities, working memory, learning and skill acquisition, psychomotor abilities, personality assessment, computer-based testing, and psychometrics. More recently his focus has been on noncognitive assessment. He is currently directing ETS’s noncognitive initiative (“new constructs”), which involves a wide array of noncognitive research and development projects ranging from K-12 to community college, college, and graduate school. Dr. Kyllonen received his Ph.D. in educational psychology in 1984 from Stanford University and his B.A. in experimental psychology from St. John's University.

Laura Lippman is a Senior Research Scientist at Child Trends where she directs the Education Program. She is a demographer with 30 years of experience developing indicators in education and positive development, and the family and school context of education. She is recognized nationally and internationally for her work on child well-being indicators. As chair of the Forum on Child and Family Statistics’ reporting committee, she led the development of the first official U.S. monitoring report on child well-being, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-being. She has published numerous reports, articles, and book chapters on education and child well-being topics, including positive indicators, urban schools, parent expectations for education, social context of families, teens, international comparisons of education and well-being, and adolescent spirituality. She co-edited the book, What do Children Need to Flourish: Conceptualizing and Measuring Indicators of Positive Development. Recent publications include a major synthesis of research on competencies across the fields of college and workplace readiness and youth development, and a state of the art conceptualization of positive indicators for UNICEF/OECD/ EC. She is currently co-principal investigator of the Flourishing Children Project, developing new indicators of flourishing that can be used in federal surveys, and is also developing indicator reports on charter schools for the National Evaluation of Charter Schools.

Christine Massey is the Director of Research and Education at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also the Director of PENNlincs, which serves as an outreach arm of the Institute, linking recent theory and research in cognitive science to education efforts in public schools and cultural institutions. She has directed a number of major collaborative research and development projects that combine research investigating students’ learning and conceptual development in science and math with the development and evaluation of new curriculum materials, learning technology, and educational programs for students and teachers. These projects include development of mathematics learning software that incorporates principles of perceptual learning; creation of the Science for Developing Minds curriculum series, a comprehensive, fully evaluated science curriculum specifically designed for children in the earliest elementary years; development of a robotics curriculum for the middle grades; and kits and exhibit enhancements to support family learning in zoos and museums. She is also a primary participant in the 21^st Century Center for Cognition and Science Instruction, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Massey was a Durant Scholar and received her B.A. from Wellesley College with honors in psychology and a second major in English.  She received her Ph.D. in psychology with a specialization in cognitive development from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Massey is an Eisenhower Fellow and has also been a fellow in the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education’s Postdoctoral Fellowship program.

Philip Moss is an economist and Professor in the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research concerns the impacts of structural change in the economy and within firms on the distribution of economic opportunity. He is particularly interested in opportunities for different race and gender groups, on the fate of low-wage workers and low wage jobs, and on changing skill needs and skill development strategies of firms. He was involved for several years in the Russell Sage/Ford/Rockefeller Foundations funded Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality doing employer based research to understand the barriers to employment of inner-minority workers. This work, co-authored with Chris Tilly, appears in, Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America, published by the Russell Sage Foundation.. Following this work he was engaged in research, through the Rockefeller and Russell Sage Foundation’s Future of Work program, on the impacts of recent changes in corporate and industrial structure on the quality and quantity of jobs, skill development, and career opportunities for entry-level workers. Some of this work appeared in, “Too Many Cooks? Tracking Internal Labor Market Dynamics in Food Service with Case Studies and Quantitative Data,” with Julia Lane, Harold Salzman, and Chris Tilly, in Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Burnhardt, and Richard Murnane, eds., Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003. “When firms restructure: Understanding work-life outcomes,” with Chris Tilly and Hal Salzman. In Ellen Kossek and Susan Lambert, eds., Work Life Integration in Organizations: New Directions for Theory and Practice NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. He has most recently worked on a comparative study of food processing work in the US and five European countries, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. This work will appear in, “Tough meat, hard candy: Implications for low wage work in the food processing industry,” with Klaus G. Grunert and Susan James, Low Wage Work in Europe and the United States: Five Industries, Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming. Professor Moss holds a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.

Alexis Spencer Notabartolo is a Researcher and Representative with the Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO. After graduation from Pitzer College, Alexis received a Fulbright research scholarship to conduct research on civil society development in the Republic of Georgia. While in Georgia, Alexis served as an election monitor with the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center and taught courses at several universities in Tbilisi. Her current work includes serving as the coordinator for the Department’s outreach to several national and global professional associations.

Senta A. Raizen started her career in science education as an NSF Program Officer dealing with curriculum improvement during the 1960s. As Director of the National Center for Improving Science Education at WestEd, Raizen has led or participated in many projects aimed at science education reform. She edited The High Stakes of High School Science, a report calling for reform of curriculum, instruction, and assessment and other practices in secondary school. Prior to that, she was responsible for a series of reports dealing with science education reform in middle and elementary schools. Raizen has led several major evaluation studies of federally sponsored programs that provide preservice education and professional development for science and mathematics teachers. She also works on formative and summative assessment of K-12 student achievement in science. Raizen has authored or edited a number of books and many articles in science and technology education. She has served in an advisory capacity to several national and international education studies, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). She co-chaired the committee that developed an innovative new Framework and Assessment Specification to guide the science assessment that was first administered by NAEP in 2009 and serves on the NAEP Standing Committee that oversees these science assessments. Her current work includes the development of a framework and assessment specifications for a NAEP assessment of Technological Literacy and the development of a White Paper for assessing 21^st Century Skills, funded by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft.

Laura Salganik, is Vice President and Director of the Federal Statistics Program, which provides technical assistance, research and development support, and project management services to the National Center for Education Statistics through the ESSI and the NAEP ESSI projects.  Previously, she was the Executive Director of the Education Statistics Services Institute.  She has worked on a number of projects under the umbrella of the OECD to improve the quality of international education statistics, most recently the DeSeCo Project (Definition and Selection of Competencies: Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations).  She is the co-editor of Defining and Selecting Key Competencies and Key Competencies for a Successful Life and a Well-Functioning Society.  The latter publication is serving as the overarching framework for the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Literacy (PIAAC).  Her areas of specialization include competencies, international comparisons of education, indicators, national and international statistics, and sociology of education.  She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from The Johns Hopkins University, her Certificate of Advanced Study in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and her M.Ed. in Elementary Education from Rhode Island College.

Gerhard Salinger is a Program Director in the Discovery Research K-12 and the ITEST programs at NSF, having been a program officer in the Instructional Materials Development program for 20 years. His interests have been in materials and professional development that support students developing evermore sophisticated understandings of science. He has strongly encouraged development of resources for the learning of concepts in technology and engineering (the T and E of STEM). Since inception in1993, Gerhard has also been the co-Lead Program Director of the Advanced Technological Education program that supports technician education at the two-year college level and preparation for that at the secondary schools. Prior to coming to the NSF in 1989, Salinger was a professor of Physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York for twenty-five years and chairman of the Department for eleven years.

Daniel Schwartz is a Professor of Education at Stanford University and co-director of the NSF Science of Learning Center – Learning in Informal and Formal Environments. Prior to graduate school, he taught secondary school in Kenya, inner-city Los Angeles, and the Alaskan bush. His research examines student understanding and representation and the ways that technology can facilitate learning. He works at the intersection of cognitive science, computer science, education, and more recently neuroscience, by examining cognition and instruction in individual, collaborative, cross-cultural, and technological settings. A theme throughout Dr. Schwartz's research is how people's facility for spatial thinking can inform and influence processes of learning, instruction, assessment and problem solving. He finds that new media make it possible to exploit spatial representations and activities in fundamentally new ways, offering an exciting complement to the verbal approaches that dominate educational research and practice.

LeeAnn M. Sutherland, a Research Scientist in the School of Education at the University of Michigan, specializes in content area literacy, and for several years has focused on integrating literacy practices and science education. She is Co-Principal Investigator of Investigating and Questioning our World through Science and Technology (IQWST), an NSF-supported project to create a standards-based middle school curriculum that integrates science content and scientific practices in biology, chemistry, earth science, and physics such that students develop coherent understandings across time and content. IQWST students experience phenomena; connect classroom science with familiar experiences; and apply their understanding as they read, write, and talk science with peers. Sutherland’s focus on integrating literacy practices and science instruction includes developing reading materials that promote student interest, self-efficacy, and sense making, as students actively participate in scientific inquiry and the Discourses of science. Sutherland is also Principal Investigator of an NSF-supported collaborative project to develop digital versions of IQWST that support differentiated instruction for all students, while focusing on supporting students with learning disabilities and struggling readers to succeed in STEM. Before earning a Ph.D. in Literacy, Language, and Culture from the University of Michigan, Sutherland taught argumentative writing in UM’s School of Literature, Science and the Arts, and prior to that taught high school English in rural, urban, and suburban contexts.

Denis Udall joins the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to lead its community college grant making as the Education Program refines its grant making strategy. In a unique arrangement, Udall will continue as a part-time program officer at the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, where he focuses on grant making and project development for initiatives to help youth who no longer qualify for foster care, postsecondary education, and training for underprepared youth and young adults. Before he joined the Johnson Foundation, Udall worked for fifteen years in urban schools and youth-serving programs, including ten years for Outward Bound USA. Udall also worked with Oxfam USA's Latin America program; was a research assistant at the Kennedy School of Government; and consulted with WestEd, the National Writing Project, and the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools. Udall has an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Sergio Urzúa is an assistant professor of economics at Northwestern University, faculty fellow of the Institute for Policy research also at Northwestern University, IZA research fellow and international research fellow of the MicroData Center at the University of Chile. He holds MA (2003) and PhD (2007) in economics from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on applied labor economics, particularly on the role of cognitive and socio-emotional skills as determinants of schooling attainment, labor market outcomes and social-behavior. His research agenda includes the development and estimation of economic models of human behavior in which agents and researchers might possess different information about the distribution of abilities in the population. Specifically, he has examined empirical economic models, which do not impose the assumption that individual’s abilities or skills are perfectly observed (or known to the researchers). In a series of papers, he has applied these techniques for the analysis of the role of IQ, self-esteem and locus of control on schooling, labor market and behavioral outcomes (Heckman, Stixrud and Urzua, 2006; Duckworth and Urzua, 2010), for the analysis of cognitive and socio-emotional abilities as determinants of racial gaps in labor market outcomes (Urzua, 2008) and schooling attainment in the context of developing economies (Bravo, Sanhueza and Urzua, 2009), and for the analysis of the effects of early-endowments on adult outcomes (Conti, Heckman and Urzua, 2010).

Victor Vuchic is a program officer for open educational resources at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Victor's focus in the education program is on technology-based grants in the area of open educational resources. For eight years before joining the Foundation, he worked as an e-business management consultant for both start-ups and large-scale companies in Silicon Valley. His work has been in domains such as wireless, online retail, music and rich media, high tech, and content management. Vic's skills are focused on user-centric business analysis: that is, helping companies refocus their strategies and operations around end users' needs. He holds a B.S.E. in systems science engineering focused on telecommunications from the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently completed his Ed.M. in the Learning, Design & Technology Program at Stanford University. Vic also received a scholarship and attended the Berklee College of Music during his undergraduate years.

Christopher A. Wolters earned a Ph.D. in Education and Psychology (1996) from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Houston, where he has served as director for the Ph.D. and M.Ed. programs in Educational Psychology since 2002. In his research, Dr. Wolters studies motivation and self-regulation, including their development and how they interact to influence students’ academic engagement, learning, and achievement. His recent empirical publications include studies examining the motivational factors that influence young adolescents’ engagement and performance in their mathematics courses; teachers’ self-efficacy and its relation to the motivational climate in their classrooms, and parents influence on their children’s motivational beliefs. Dr. Wolters regularly teaches graduate courses at that focus on learning and cognition, adolescent development, motivation, and self-regulated learning. He is a member of the editorial boards for Journal of Educational Psychology and Educational Psychologist, serves on the Executive Committee of Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association, and is the 2011 Program Chair for Division C (Learning and Instruction) for the American Educational Research Association.