Georgia State University’s Georgia Policy Labs (GPL) has named behavior analytics researcher and clinician Jennifer L. Austin the winner of its fourth annual Engaged Research Competition.

Austin, an assistant professor in the Department of Learning Sciences in the College of Education and Human Development, will receive an award of almost $30,000 to support a research-practice partnership with the Boyce L. Ansley School, a tuition-free private school for children of families in the metro-Atlanta area who have experienced homelessness. The school serves children in kindergarten through fifth grade, providing meals, uniforms, school supplies, transportation and an after-school program at no cost to families.

Austin will work with the Ansley School to support the implementation of positive, evidence-based strategies to promote children’s prosocial behavior and academic engagement. Adopting a trauma-informed framework for the design and delivery of support strategies, the partnership will leverage student and teacher input to codesign class-wide interventions aimed at supporting meaningful behavior change and empowering children and their teachers. The award will provide resources for systematically evaluating processes and outcomes, which may inform the ways in which behavioral interventions are designed and implemented in schools that serve students who are at risk.

“Experiencing homelessness and related adverse events in childhood often has negative impacts on the development of skills needed for success at school and in other life domains. For example, children might have missed important ‘learning to learn’ skills such as following directions, taking turns and effectively managing their own emotions in the face of disappointments or challenges,” Austin said. “The good news is that we can arrange school environments to effectively teach these skills in ways that honor children’s specific needs. However, these strategies must also be practical for busy teachers. This project will focus on developing strategies that can be implemented at the classroom level, which may help us maximize efficiency and promote more generalizable outcomes across children.”

The Engaged Research Competition, funded by the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, the Office of the Provost and the Dan E. Sweat Endowment, promotes partnership-based research by Georgia State’s faculty and researchers by removing the structural barriers that can prevent them from conducting partner-driven research. These barriers may include lengthier time to publication, data-sharing complications and time needed to build trust with a partner.

Associate Professor of Economics Jonathan Smith, Graduate Research Assistant Deborah Aba Gaisie and Sam Rauschenberg, vice president of growth and impact at Achieve Atlanta, judged this year’s competition. GPL has previously selected three winners of the Engaged Research Competition.