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Senate Faculty
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Henry Jay "Hank" Becker
Professor
Department of Education
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Biography
Before arriving at UC Irvine in 1992, Dr. Becker spent 15 years as a sociologist working at a federally-funded educational research center at Johns Hopkins University. He was trained as a specialist in designing and administering large sample surveys and as a statistical analyst of survey data.
During the 1980's, Dr. Becker studied parent-involvement practices of teachers. He also participated with research on curriculum and scheduling alternatives for middle grades schools and the effects of different school organizations on 6th grade achievement.
Through the 1990's the largest part of Dr. Becker's work became the documentation and evaluation of how schools and teachers use computers in their instructional programs. In 1983, 1985, 1989, and 1998 he conducted national surveys to assess computer utilization in schools. In 1987 he conducted a large-scale field experiment to measure the effectiveness of typical practices at that time for using computers in grade 5 to 8 mathematics.
Most recently his interests have turned away from educational computing and towards what he believes is a most serious problem facing education, that of the failure of social studies education to focus upon the issues facing our current and future citizens in our social and political world. Instead, social studies and the state and national standards which govern its curriculum are obsessed with never-ending details about history, no matter how far removed from current and future civic choices and problems. It is not that students can't learn useful concepts and points of view from studying history, but that pressure to include encyclopedic arrays of historical information crowds out much more important content of social studies curricula.
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