Joan D. Pasley, Vice President of Horizon Research, Inc. (HRI), received a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from the University of Cincinnati, a Master’s Degree in Educational Administration from Xavier University, and a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has had extensive coursework in educational evaluation and curriculum theory and analysis. In addition to teaching science at the high school level, Dr. Pasley served as a high school administrator in an urban school district where she gained experience in curriculum development, assessment, and instructional evaluation.
Dr. Pasley has been working at HRI since 1994 on a number of technical assistance, research, and evaluation projects, including directing the national core evaluation of NSF’s Local Systemic Change through Teacher Enhancement program, and the program evaluations of the Merck Institute for Science Education’s Consortium for Achievement in Mathematics and Science; the National Science Teacher Association’s New Science Teacher Academy; the University of Rochester’s Deepening Everyone’s Mathematics Content Knowledge project; and the American Physiological Society’s Frontiers in Physiology project. She served as PI for the Math and Science Partnership Knowledge Management and Dissemination project and as co-PI for the Operationalizing the Science and Engineering Practices project, which developed measures of how, and how often, science teachers implement the practices described in the Next Generation Science Standards. She also served as deputy director of the science strand for US Department of Education-funded Center on Instruction and provided technical assistance to the US Department of Education-funded Teacher Incentive Fund grants with a focus on STEM.
Dr. Pasley currently directs evaluations of the several NSF-funded projects including the University of Connecticut’s Promoting Lifelong STEM Learning Through a Focus on Conservation, Geospatial Technology, and Community Engagement project, which is promoting STEM learning fostered by intergenerational partnerships between high school students and adult community members working on environmental conservation projects; PlantingScience: Digging Deeper Together, a research study led by the Botanical Society of America and BSCS Science Learning examining a model for collaborative teacher/scientist professional development; and Next Generation of STEM Teacher Preparation, a collaborative among multiple higher education institutions focused on improving STEM teacher preparation across partner institutions in Washington State. In addition, she serves as the co-PI for the Principles and Resources For Integrating Computational Thinking Into High School Science Courses, an NSF-funded project studying the infusion of computational thinking into high school biology and chemistry courses. Dr. Pasley has provided technical assitance and evaluation services to a number of state-level STEM education improvement efforts, school district-university partnerships, and university-based STEM departments.
