Hank Becker

Henry Jay Becker Leaves a Legacy of Contribution and Innovation at Department of Education.

Irvine, Calif., December 1, 2007

Henry Jay (Hank) Becker is retiring this month after more than 15 years in the Department of Education at UCI.  Across a 35-year career as a survey-research-oriented sociologist of education, he is best known for research on ways that teachers use computers in their classroom and his finding that exemplary use of computers depends on teachers having a pedagogical philosophy consistent with a constructivist theory of learning.  At UCI, he was lead researcher on a national study called Teaching, Learning, and Computing: 1998, which examined the relationship of teachers' use of computers to their basic pedagogical beliefs and practices and their involvement in professional leadership activities.  The study, conducted with colleagues Ron Anderson of the University of Minnesota and UCI colleagues Margaret Riel and Jason Ravitz, involved more than 6,000 teachers, technology coordinators, and principals.  The participants included both a national probability sample of schools and teachers as well as educators at schools that were participating in major instructional reform programs or that had unusual levels of computer technology. Besides this national survey, while at UCI Becker conducted studies of the National School Network, a collaboration of curriculum reform projects at the leading edge of Internet use during the mid-1990s.  In addition, along with colleagues Ronald Corwin, of SWRL, and Kathryn Nakagawa, then of UCI, he studied early implementations of charter schools in California.

Becker came to UCI from Johns Hopkins University, where, at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, he had conducted three other national surveys of teachers' instructional use of school computers, including one as the United States coordinator for the international I.E.A. "Comp-Ed" study of 1989.  In addition to the surveys, Becker conducted several experimental design-based studies of the effectiveness of computer-based approaches to teaching including a national field experiment of their effectiveness in 50 grade 5-8 mathematics classes across 13 states.  Outside of educational computing, Becker worked with Joyce Epstein on studies of parent involvement practices of teachers and effective grade-level structures for middle-grades education, and conducted several studies of racial segregation in housing, employment, and schooling.  

During his career, Becker served as a member of the White House Panel on Educational Technology, consulted with numerous organizations including the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress and, on a number of occasions, the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International; he was a member of the board of directors of the Agency for Instructional Technology; and he testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources and the National Governors' Association. 

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