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Senate Faculty
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AnneMarie Conley
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
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Biography
AnneMarie Conley earned her B.A. in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2000 and M.S. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2002. She recently received her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology from the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan.
For the last three years Dr. Conley has been a research associate for the NSF-funded Math Science Partnership – Motivation Assessment Program (MSP-MAP; www.mspmap.org). The project she managed was a 3-year, 7-wave longitudinal study of classroom influences on patterns of student motivation in Orange County mathematics classrooms undergoing reform. To date the assessment has included 16,000 middle and high school students in approximately 500 classrooms (each wave) in 14 schools.
Research
Dr. Conley's entry point into important issues in education is motivational processes. Teenagers drop out of high school or graduate without mastering basic skills; girls continue to be underrepresented in careers in math and science; talented students burn out or fail to apply themselves, with test scores and academic records not indicative of their potential. At the heart of these disparate problems in education today, however, lies a common solution—motivation.
Motivation affects learners of all ages, in all areas of education, in schools, at home, and in the workplace. Barring extreme learning disability or serious lack of resources, students who are motivated to learn will learn. As a solution motivation can be cost effective, depending not on investment in technology or resources, but on the modification of learning climates to facilitate its development. Further, educators need not figure out how to create motivation; it is present in most children from birth, evident in their earliest explorations of the world. Motivation need only be fostered, or at the very least not constrained.
Just as motivation can be a panacea, failure to attend to motivation can thwart the most promising educational reforms. The best curricula and the most useful technologies will be wasted in the absence of motivation to use them. Recent reforms, with their focus on accountability through high-stakes testing, have largely ignored the role of motivation, or are based on assumptions about motivation that are at odds with what motivation research demonstrates. Dr. Conley's research aims to understand motivational processes in today’s schools by asking how students’ motivation to learn develops and how this development can be supported by teachers, classrooms, and schools. She studies learners who are ethnically, economically, and linguistically diverse and investigate students in context using a range of quantitative approaches, including Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), and person-centered approaches like cluster analysis and latent class analysis.
Publications
Selected publications include:
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