Dr. Kimberley Gomez

Professor, School of Education & Information Studies,

University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Kimberley Gomez is a Full Professor in the School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA. She leverages design-based, participatory, and impact-focused research methodologies to study and support pedagogical and integrative practices in STEM teaching and learning with the aim of supporting more socially just and equitably focused designed tools and contexts. She has been a recipient of funding from a range of public and private foundations including the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the W.T. Grant Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. In 2019 she was awarded an 18-month NSF CS for All funding as a part of the Researcher-Practitioner Partnership (RPP) program. The focus of this program  was the co-design of effective problem-solving pedagogy practices in elementary CS classes. The work introduced an extension of the conjecture map conceptual tool, by adding equity conjectures to the mapping.  The equity conjectures supported conceptualization, and co-design of the CS lesson templates.  Reports of this work have appeared in Cognition and Instruction and other outlets. From 2021-2024 she was the Research Director of the STEM+C3 UCLA Center-X study of pre-service teachers' development of STEM content and computational thinking integration content and pedagogy in Southern California schools. Currently, she is a Co-PI (with June Ahn) on a 3-year W.T. Grant Foundation funded study of the use of research evidence in working within Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs). With Ahn, she is attending to anti-racist processes and structural features of RPPs. In this work, they aim to illustrate the potential of RPPs for addressing persistent systemic K-12 educational inequities. Reports of this work have appeared in The Peabody Journal of Education, the Proceedings of the International Society 0f the Learning Sciences, and related outlets.  Dr. Gomez is also the co-author of two volumes, The work of language in multicultural classrooms: Talking science, writing science (2008, Routledge) and The Digital Youth Network: Cultivating New Media Citizenship in Urban Communities (2014, MIT Press). From 2011-2019, Dr. Gomez was a Senior Fellow for Literacy and Language at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The focus of this work was the co-design of literacy supports in developmental mathematics curricula. The author of over 60 publications, she has received numerous awards, including the Harold A. and Lois Haytin Faculty Award from UCLA for her collaborative work with practitioners and the UCLA Department of Education Distinguished Teaching Award. She is a Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. Dr. Gomez received the Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from The University of Chicago. 

At ICOLSEI 2025, Professor Kimberley Gomez will deliver a speech titled "Collaborative Design: Its Roots and Practices in the Learning Sciences". The Learning Sciences embraces participation and design as core methods. Beginning in the middle 1970s, many social science scholars were finding that certain kinds of problems were less open and tractable to research in their disciplines. These researchers pointed to a need to have both participation and design serve as essential aspects of study. They recognized that children and adults operated within a wide range of authentic contexts that enabled them, as individuals and within groups to build knowledge and skills to engage in daily learning. Understanding how to develop and employ research that captured cognition (in and outside of the head), and how to work in-situ with administrators, practitioners, students, and others shaped the Learning Sciences. Ultimately, attending to authentic contexts, employing design and participation methods and tools, and being willing to iteratively refine content, pedagogy, and collaborative approaches became core tools of the Learning Sciences. Encapsulating this journey is the subject of the presentation.