Elisabeth A Etopio

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York | SUNY Buffalo · Department of Learning and Instruction

Despite existing as a pre-pandemic need, the pandemic shed light on the importance of increasing attention to the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, emotions and life experiences of our preservice teachers (PSTs), teacher candidates , doctoral students, co-authors, and colleagues. At this transformative juncture, it is essential to foster a cultur...

This narrative imagines the future of education through three vignettes, each of which describes a community of learners exploring artifacts from the past even as they learn together in the present. Scenarios trace the experiences of Eden, who was born in 2012, and her involvement with learning and educational institutions. Threaded through vignett...

Why are preservice teachers often told by veteran teachers to "forget what you learned" in teacher preparation programs? Why is there a gap between pedagogical practices employed at schools and those taught at colleges and universities? And why, after evidence from countless studies, are there still so few teachers of color working in our rapidly d...

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is estimated to have an incidence rate of about 3.4% in children and adolescent populations. The purpose of this meta-analysis is to identify and quantify the effect of FASD on functional status in areas such Executive Function. This meta-analysis examines 46 studies comparing 2,307 participants across a range...

Teachers have been asked to do virtually everything—plan fantastic educational lessons, manage behavior, use technologies to engage and promote learning, assess and report to stakeholders, build strong relationships, advocate for students, keep family secrets, and more. However, as technologies have progressed and become more widely available, and...

Many teacher preparation programs include field experiences in order to expose preservice teachers to the complexity and unpredictability of the classrooms in which they will be expected to practice. The application of virtual reality (VR) has received considerable research and popular attention. During construction of understanding in preservice t...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate, compare, and characterize interactive VR-based preservice science teacher clinical teaching environments with those of real-life teaching environments. Fifty-four college-aged students were assigned randomly to either real-life conditions or VR conditions. The main effect of the VR condition vers...

Dissertation: Developing an Artificial Neural Network to Measure Visual Science Literacy using fNIRS

This study investigates the role that textbooks, virtual reality (VR), and mixed approaches (i.e., text and VR) can play in the development of the two writing types, summary and argument writing. This study uses hemodynamics as a proxy for learning. Differences in hemodynamic responses during writing tasks were measured across four different pedago...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role textbooks can play on writing complexity and lexical density as a proxy for critical thinking and ultimately learning, in relation to argumentative and summative writing when integrated with a virtual reality experience. In this study, differences in writing complexity and lexical density scores...

Many teacher preparation programs include field experiences for preservice science teachers. The purpose of these experiences are to expose those wishing to teach to the complexity of the classrooms in which they will be asked to practice. As the need for experiences has increased, there has been more attention placed on modes of instruction that c...

Virtual Reality (VR) has potential as a method for engaging in meaningful play therapy. Therapists in a variety of contexts use multiple types of activities to advance sessions with their child patients. Despite the wide availability of electronic games, virtual reality, and children’s near ubiquitous use of these technologies in their free time, t...

The purpose of this two-year study, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), was to examine the impact of "musically trained" early childhood specialists on the music achievement and emergent literacy achievement of preschool students. The sample, obtained through use of a letter of recruitment mailed to a regional group of N...

With increased interest in early childhood music education and research, there exists a need for a model, performance-based criterion measure to assess young children’s emergent music achievement. This project, partially supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, consisted of several studies for development and implementation of that model....

Characteristics of early musical environments associated with preschool children's music skills