Winners

Estela Mara Bensimon

Founder & Director, Center for Urban Education
University Professor & Dean’s Professor in Educational Equity
Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California

In a career devoted to racial and gender parity in higher education, Estela Mara Bensimon has been instrumental in creating more equitable campus environments across the United States for students and faculty alike. In 1999 she founded the Center on Urban Education, a nationally renowned research hub dedicated to transforming the institutional culture of American higher education. She developed the Equity Scorecard, a process for using inquiry to examine institutional practices at the university level so they can become more responsive to issues of racial and gender equity. Bensimon and her colleagues at the Center for Urban Education have provided hundreds of faculty and administrators with tools to create equitable curricula. The Equity Scorecard also helps them to develop equity mindedness, an increased awareness of how race and gender impact student and faculty, and how structural practices prevent many Black, Latinx, and other racially minoritized students from succeeding in higher education. The Equity Scorecard has been implemented by more than 100 community colleges, colleges, and state university systems from coast to coast.

Bensimon has published extensively on equity, organizational learning, and practitioner inquiry. She recently co-authored From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education. She is past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. In 2017, Bensimon was elected to the National Academy of Education. She received the Social Justice Award from the American Educational Research Association, and the Research/Teaching Award for Outstanding Latino/a Faculty in Higher Education from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico.

Bensimon emigrated from Argentina at age 12. She served in the Teacher Corps and was a community organizer in New Jersey for 10 years before becoming a bilingual educator and receiving her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. 

Learn more about Estela Mara Bensimon’s work.

Michelene T. H. Chi

Regents Professor, Dorothy Bray Endowed Professor of Science and Teaching at Arizona State University
Director of the Learning and Cognition Lab

A global leader in cognitive and learning science research, Michelene (Micki) Chi has made numerous advances to our understanding of how students learn, particularly in STEM domains. Her breakthroughs in human cognition “have shaped a generation of cognitive and learning scientists,” according to the Cognitive Science Society. Highlights of her work include creating a powerful framework (ICAP) of active learning; developing an understanding of the power of self-explanation as a key way to learn; evolving our knowledge of the differences in how experts and nonexperts think; and influencing how we think about learning in more interactive settings. She has published more than 100 scholarly articles on these and related topics in the cognitive and learning sciences.

As director of the Learning and Cognition Lab at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Chi continues to oversee a number of projects focused on promoting deeper learning. Of particular relevance to education in the COVID era is the lab’s research on the benefit of incorporating tutorial dialogues in online learning videos, compared to lecture-style monologues.

Chi has been recognized with numerous honors throughout her career, including election to the National Academy of Education in 2010, the E.L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association in 2015, and the prestigious David E. Rumelhart Prize for significant contribution to theoretical foundations of human cognition by the Cognitive Science Society in 2019. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

Before joining the faculty at Arizona State University in 2008, Chi was a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Born in Thailand, she immigrated to the United States from Indonesia with her parents and, at age 16, became a U.S. citizen.

Learn more about Michelene Chi’s work.

Joseph S. Krajcik

Lappan-Phillips Professor of Science Education at Michigan State University
Founder and Director of the CREATE for STEM Institute

Starting his career as a high school chemistry and physical science teacher and working with teachers for over three decades, Joe Krajcik knows classrooms, teachers, and students. He is passionate about developing environments that best support student engagement and learning. Krajcik’s research and work in classrooms has transformed the teaching and learning of STEM in elementary and secondary schools, nationwide and around the world. Because of his knowledge of how students learn and of science, Krajcik led the writing of the disciplinary ideas for physical science for the Framework for K-12 Science Education, developed by the National Academy of Science. Krajcik also led the development of the physical science standards for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), often called the most important advancement in science education in decades. Throughout his career, Krajcik has explored and advanced the use of project-based learning (PBL), a teaching and learning approach that aligns with the vision of the Framework and the NGSS. The author of a fifth edition book on PBL, Krajcik has pioneered this approach for K-12 science teaching and learning that has inspired hundreds of science teachers and thousands of students. Krajcik has led the development of several project-based learning curriculum efforts at the elementary, middle, and high school level that have been adopted by school districts throughout the country. Krajcik has collaborated with teachers from Los Angeles to New York, as well as internationally, including China, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, Turkey, and Finland.

Krajcik’s collaborations with Detroit public school teachers and leaders has been ongoing for decades. These collaborations have allowed him to lead the development of project-based learning environments in which students use scientific and engineering practices with the big ideas of science to make sense of the world in which they live and to inspire a sense of wonderment about the physical world. Krajcik realizes that when students engage in making sense of phenomena, they come to see themselves as knowledgeable participants in an increasingly STEM-influenced society. Krajcik uses his own experiences as a teacher and his work with teachers to drive his development of project-based science environments to support all students in learning. He continues his work to transform teaching and learning of STEM as director of CREATE for STEM Institute which stands for Collaborative Research in Education, Assessment, and Teaching Environments at Michigan State University. CREATE’s mission is to improve the teaching and learning of STEM through innovation and research.

Krajcik is a past president of NARST, formally known as the National Association of Research in Science Teaching, a global organization to improve science teaching, and has served as editor for the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. A member of the National Academy of Education, he has authored over 170 publications and attracted over $30 million in grants. He spent 21 years at the University of Michigan before moving to Michigan State University in 2011 to direct the CREATE Institute. One MSU colleague said that Krajcik “has done about as much as one person can conceivably do to transform K-12 education outcomes in science for students in his home state, across the nation, and around the world."

Learn more about Joseph Krajcik’s work.