Carrie D. Allen

University of Colorado at Boulder

Biography

Carrie is a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on the relationships among schooling practices, teacher instruction, and student participation and identity in STEM education. She has examined the ways that students instantiate and maintain STEM identities throughout high school; and the processes of teacher learning and enactment of reform practices within science education. Her dissertation work focuses on the ways the current reform in STEM education gets understood and implemented locally and the implications these understandings and uptake have for teachers and students.

As a graduate research assistant on the Longitudinal Study of Connected Learning, Carrie is interested in how students’ identity instantiations in out-of-school STEM-learning contexts compare to STEM-related identity instantiations in formal school contexts; and how out-of-school STEM-learning contexts can help us theorize about how to best bolster student participation, sense of belonging, and future orientation in STEM fields within schools.

Carrie is a National Science Foundation 2014-2015 CADRE Fellow. Before beginning her doctoral work, Carrie worked as a high school teacher, coach, and community college instructor and advisor in the Seattle area.