NCID-2102
Wanda Casillas
2014-2015 NCID Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Developmental Psychology (Cornell University)
About
Dr. Casillas earned a PhD from the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. She is a program evaluation consultant and researcher, focusing on identifying and applying principles of culturally responsive evaluation and systems heuristics to evaluation practice.Dr. Casillas also conducts research on the role of culture in human cognitive development. She proposes investigations for the role of culturally-situated knowledge in adolescent reasoning and learning in STEM domains. Both of Dr. Casillas’ research interests converge on a central concern for the learning, cognitive development, and performance of underrepresented minority students in the sciences.
Current Work
PROJECT: An investigation of reasoning in professional evaluators' application of culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) principlesA causal reasoning paradigm (Koslowski, 1996) is adapted to investigate how culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) professionals reason about culture in evaluation practice. By adapting this research paradigm we intend to 1) determine the extent to which these CRE principles are applied across varying contexts, 2) determine the extent to which approaches that utilize CRE principles are discernable from other evaluation approaches, 3) investigate the role of culturally situated background knowledge in how evaluators reason about culture in their evaluation work, and 4) verify that CRE principles systematically derived in earlier research (Casillas & Trochim, in preparation) represent how evaluators think about culture in evaluation practice.PROJECT: Intergenerational Differences in Causal Reasoning of Latino FamiliesIn this project, we survey families from Latino communities in the Detroit area. Data is collected regarding familial relationships, attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes in school, acculturation level, demographic information, etc. This data is combined with a measure of causal reasoning in order to investigate differences between parent and child causal reasoning.