Assistant Professors of Mathematics Education Sunghwan Byun and Samantha Marshall Receive Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award

NC State College of Education Assistant Professors of Mathematics Education Sunghwan Byun and Samantha Marshall have been selected as recipients of NC State University’s 2024 Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award.

The Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award recognizes assistant professors who demonstrate early productivity in STEM or STEM education research and innovation. Goodnight Early Career Innovators receive $22,000 in funding annually for three years to support their scholarship and research. 

“To me, this [award] is a symbol of encouragement to further my scholarly efforts for instructional innovations in statistics and data science education,” Byun said. “I am so thankful for the support from the faculty and leadership team in the College of Education. This award also means my research collaborations with colleagues in the Data Science and AI Academy (DSA) and the Department of Statistics are valued and encouraged.”

“It is such a tremendous honor to be chosen as a Goodnight Early Career Innovator,” Marshall said. “I am so touched by the faith in my work demonstrated by this award, and I cannot thank enough my mentor, [Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor] Sarah Carrier, as well as Dean Paola Sztajn and the many other colleagues who took a chance on me and have supported me along the way.”

Learn more about Byun’s and Marshall’s research, and how they will use their Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award to further their scholarly work, below.

Sunghwan Byun

Byun’s research focuses on social interaction in mathematics and statistics classrooms as well as the ways in which teachers facilitate classroom interaction to support students as knowledge producers with computational tools. 

As the director of educational research at the NC State Data Science and AI Academy, Byun has engaged in collaborative efforts to broaden participation in academy courses, which are open to all NC State students and require no prerequisites. 

Over the past semester, he facilitated an instructor inquiry community to design and implement support for beginning programmers using generative artificial intelligence tools with a focus on a nuanced view of the roles these tools play in student learning. 

He is also a collaborator on a three-year, National Science Foundation grant-funded project that is designing and assessing modules to help graduate teaching assistants teach while using real-world data in the classroom. 

“Funding from this award will help me disseminate my scholarly efforts more widely and contribute to the prominence of NC State in this research domain. It will also allow me to invite more efforts from graduate students who share an interest in undergraduate statistics and data science education,” Byun said.

Samantha Marshall

Marshall’s research focuses on designing and investigating supports for STEM teachers’ learning as a tool for educational improvement. 

This year, she received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant that will enable her to partner with middle school teachers to co-design, analyze and improve teachers’ translanguaging pedagogies, or pedagogies that draw on students’ full linguistic repertoires as resources for learning. That project recently began the first of three data collection studies, focused on co-designing translanguaging resources. 

She is also the principal investigator on Project AWISE, which aims to improve professional development through the development of a coaching model to support mathematics teachers of multilingual learners. 

Along with Byun, who is a co-principal investigator on the project, in phase one they explored how mathematics teachers make sense of teaching multilingual learners, with a focus on uncovering the challenges teachers encounter, the decisions they make, and how they think about successes and failures in their work with these students. In phase two of the project, which began this year, they will work with schools across North Carolina to investigate their coaching model. 

“I hope to use this award to support my research agenda of exploring how mathematics learning environments can be more just,” Marshall said. “These funds will allow me to expand my research plans by supporting exploratory studies, offering participant incentives, supporting doctoral students and presenting work at conferences. I believe this award will enable me to deepen my research in exciting ways.”