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2025 Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award Lecture
Friday, April 10,  3:45 pm to 5:15 pm
Los Angeles Convention Center, Level Two - Room 408B

Speaker: Robert C. Pianta (University of Virginia)

Title: Actionable and relevant education science: Focus on People, Processes, and Contexts That Foster Students’ Learning and Development

The lecture draws on more than two decades of research on the measurement and improvement of teacher-student interactions in tens of thousands of classrooms—across grade levels, cultural and economic contexts, students, and teachers. This work bridges developmental and education science to create resources relevant locally and at scale. By grounding education scholarship in the science of human development, Dr. Pianta argues that education research be oriented around a view of learning that is both comprehensive and personalized, and the relational, personal, and educational processes that support it.

2025 Distinguished Public Service Award Lecture
Friday, April 10,  11:45 am to 1:15 pm
Los Angeles Convention Center, Level Two - Room 408B

Speaker: Joan Ferrini-Mundy (University of Maine)

Title: Evolving Research for Impact: People, Purposes, and Periods in Time Reflections on Public Service for STEM and Beyond

In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote: “Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.” The concept of research as a public good, and calls for more such research, independent of funding source, are central to education and many other fields. Such calls and assumptions beg questions about which publics, what counts as good, what purposes are being advanced, what constitutes impact, and how do priorities change over time.

Using examples from my experiences in STEM and STEM education, I will explore how dimensions of research for the public good evolve. Changes in policy contexts, societal needs, institutional circumstances, and even the new knowledge and tools that research produces affect the evolution of research. And, reciprocally, research for the public good can influence, inform, and impact policy, society, institutions, and the quest for more new knowledge and tools. How can this bi-directionality be lifted up, and even accelerated over periods of time when changes around us happen rapidly?

Research for the public good may stand its best chances of having impact and enduring when it reshapes how problems areframed to address potential users' needs, contemplates a range of questions, and interprets findings for multiple publics. Using examples from STEM education, federal STEM research leadership, the mathematics standards movement, and institutional change in higher education, I illustrate how public service can enable the promotion of research to inform and impact the public good.

2025 Early Career Award Lecture
Thursday, April 9, 9:45 am to 11:15 am
Los Angeles Convention Center, Level Two - Room 408B

Speaker: Raquel Muñiz (Boston College)

Title: Research at the Intersection of Law and Education Policy: Conditions, Strategies, and Mechanisms that Shape Educational Equity

Restrictive law and policy contexts have increasingly become the norm across the U.S. In this lecture, I draw attention to how systemic contexts shape educational (in)equity. I draw attention to two interrelated areas. First, I discuss how law and education policy are mechanisms that have over time shifted the discretionary bounds for practitioners, establishing restrictive conditions that hinder educational equity for students who have experienced substantial adversity. Second, I discuss how research use operates as a strategy and mechanism that informs educational equity policy debates in courts and policymaking contexts. I conclude with potential pathways to shape and leverage conditions, strategies, and conditions in furtherance of educational equity.

2025 Social Justice in Education Award Lecture
Saturday, April 11, 8:00 am to 9:15 am
Los Angeles Convention Center, Level Two - Room 403A

Speaker: Gloria Swindler Boutte (University of South Carolina)

Title: Beyond Learned Powerlessness to Educational Liberation

Echoing Alice Walker’s reflections on learned powerlessness, this lecture invites educators and researchers to reclaim the agency that has always been ours. At a moment when oppressive forces continue their attempts to diminish the human spirit, this session calls us to not only do no harm but to unapologetically do good and get into “good trouble”—nod to Ancestor John Lewis. Guided by an African diasporic vision for educational justice, the lecture draws upon the Akan principle Fawohodie, symbolizing freedom, independence, emancipation—and the profound responsibilities that accompany them. Through this lens, the session traces how systemic silencing has been strategically cultivated, and why, in the words of Audre Lorde, “our silence will not protect us.” Rather than accepting narratives of powerlessness, participants will be invited to imagine and enact collective agency. Concrete strategies rooted in community, culture, and resistance are highlighted.