Kudos: Three kinesiology students receive national scholarships; Luft and alumni receive NARST award

Three kinesiology students receive NATA’s Research and Education Foundation scholarships

Three students in the Department of Kinesiology were awarded scholarships by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association’s (NATA) Research and Education Foundation to support their educational endeavors.

Awardees of the $2,300 scholarship include Rachel Johnson (Ph.D. ’23), Kaitlyn Jones (B.S.Ed. ’21), and Megan Pierce (B.S.Ed. ’21). A total of 65 NATA Foundation scholarships were awarded to students across the country.

“Receiving this scholarship means that others are able to look at my work, my achievements, and my goals and believe that I will be successful in the athletic training career,” Jones said. “This award conveys that I am worth the investment, so I may further represent athletic training in a way that honors and promotes the profession.”

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Luft and alumni receive NARST’s Research Worth Reading Awards

Julie Luft, the Athletic Association Professor of Mathematics and Science Education and Distinguished Research Professor, as well as alumni Shannon Navy (Ph.D. ’14), Ryan Nixon (Ph.D. ’15), and Melissa Jurkiewicz (Ph.D. ’14), will receive the National Association for Research in Science Teaching’s (NARST) Research Worth Reading Award for their publication, “Accessed or Latent Resources? Exploring New Secondary Science Teachers’ Networks of Resources,” during the annual NARST meeting. This recognition is given to published papers in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching that are viewed as having significant implications for science educators and practitioners.

Their study focused on understanding how newly hired science teachers access different types of resources (human, material, social, strategic, symbolic) in their first years of teaching. The study found that some teachers leave useful resources untapped (latent). From this study, science teacher educators need to help teachers learn to recognize and access these resources. This study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Navy, Nixon, and Jurkiewicz were graduate students when working on this study, while Luft guided the project.