PSTC faculty associate Jayanti Owens, the Mary Tefft and John Hazen White, Sr. Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs and Sociology, has recently been named a recipient of the William T. Grant Scholar Award. The WT Grant Foundation funds research focused on improving outcomes for America’s children and youth, with a particular focus on how to reduce inequality as well as how policymakers and practitioners use research evidence. 

The Foundation’s Scholars program supports early-career researchers by funding five-year research projects and selecting recipients who exhibit potential to become influential researchers in their fields, as well as take measured risks within their research and its trajectory. 

Much of Owens’ past research focuses on social disparities in education, including investigations of the gender gap in educational attainment, how ADHD diagnoses impact education and labor market outcomes, and a recent project that investigated the mechanisms behind racial disparities in school discipline. 

In her work as a WT Grant Scholar, Owens will extend her studies of disparities in school discipline through a three-part project. The first part involves a video experiment in which teachers around the country will analyze video vignettes of various types of classroom misbehavior. The second part uses textual data from school disciplinary referral forms. For the third component, Owens plans to develop a diagnostic tool that can identify and begin to alleviate problematic disciplinary trends in schools throughout the country. 

This new project will take Owens outside of her comfort zone. She explained: “This entire project is a key, measured risk, by design. Part of the mission of the WT Grant Scholars Program is for researchers to take measured risks that expand their expertise and have high potential for impact in reducing inequality. My measured risks are that I will learn the computational text analysis that is necessary to automate the analysis of teachers’ textual descriptions of student behavior from the administrative discipline data from a large school district. I have also partnered with experts in theatrical directing, cinematography, and film editing to create the video vignettes. And I am partnering with experts in research-practice partnerships and program evaluation for Part 3. To aid with these components, I have a strong mentorship team and advisory board with people who are experts in each of these areas. I am going to be learning a lot!”

Although this research territory may present new challenges, Owens expects that her past research surrounding education and various determinants of social disparities has helped her develop useful skills. “I have investigated behavioral evaluations and their consequences across a variety of domains, from school discipline to mental health diagnoses and academic performance to employment interviews. This breadth has required me to be fluent in a range of literatures,” she remarked. 

Her interest in educational outcomes began as a college undergraduate with the realization that the education system was embedded in a larger social structure and system that “extended well beyond myself and my behaviors and anything that I was able to do as an individual actor. I was captivated by the idea that our education system serves as one of the few formalized systems for social mobility in our country (and in the world). I wanted to understand the operations of this complex system, how it operates differently for people from different groups, how it intersects with other social institutions (like families, the health care system, the labor market), and how this shapes inequalities at the population level.”