Maria Kolovou

Department of Teaching and Learning

Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award in Teaching and Learning

Maria Kolovou’s dissertation research introduced drama-based approaches for elementary and middle school science learning. Her research design advanced theories of embodied and distributed forms of cognition for interdisciplinary learning. Her qualitative analytic approach involved the close analysis of interaction and discourse from video records to reveal complex patterns in youth’s creativity processes for developing scientific knowledge through the creation of artistic representations. Maria’s research meets a need for innovative STEAM interventions in lower and middle school science classrooms that can engage particularly girls and culturally and linguistically diverse adolescent youth to ultimately change the demographic make-up of STEM fields.