Lei Ye, a PhD Candidate in the ITLS department, was selected to receive a $5,000 Dissertation Fellowship from the School of Graduate Studies at Utah State University. The fellowship recognizes doctoral students with excellent academic performance and accomplishments and is intended to support outstanding doctoral students with their dissertation studies.

Lei Ye is currently a graduate assistant on a National Science Foundation-funded research project, led by Drs. Mimi Recker, Andy Walker, and Victor Lee, that helps high school Earth Science teachers use high quality Internet resources in their instruction. Lei's dissertation study (part of a larger research project) will focus on modeling the relationships among the technology intervention (The Curriculum Customization Service), school district characteristics, teacher practices, and student learning outcomes. In particular, this study will involve over 100 teachers and 3,000 students in five school districts. The findings will add to the understanding of how technology tools may impact science teachers and students at a large scale. It will also contribute to the literature on how to model nested educational dataset using advanced statistical techniques.