Highlights from NCER (Archive)

NCER Grantee Receives Early Career Research Award
Florida State University's Victor Sampson, a National Center for Education Research (NCER) grantee, was awarded the 2012 Early Career Research Award from the National Association for Research in Science Teaching. The Early Career Research Award is given annually to a researcher who, within the first seven years after completion of their doctoral degree, demonstrates the greatest potential to make outstanding and continuing contributions to research in science education.

Dr. Sampson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Teacher Education and the FSU-Teach Program. He specializes in argumentation, assessment, and teacher professional development in science education. His work centers on ways to promote more meaningful learning inside the classroom and ways to provide teachers with opportunities to learn within and from their practice in a way that initiates and sustains change.

The focal point of Dr. Sampson's research thus far has been on how students engage in argumentation in the context of science and how to make this type of activity more productive in the classroom. His current work focuses on the ways students support and evaluate ideas through discussion and writing in the context of science, especially group and individual meaning making during argumentation. A leader in the development of innovative instructional materials and strategies that emphasize argumentation as part of the doing, teaching, and learning of science, Sampson has also studied how teachers' knowledge and beliefs about science, learning, and science teaching affect how they teach. More information about Dr. Sampson's IES grant can be found here: http://ies.ed.gov/ncer/projects/grant.asp?ProgID=12&grantid=1011&InvID=728