Leigh Harrell-Williams
Associate Professor | Dean's Faculty Fellow
About Dr. Harrell-Williams
As a former undergraduate statistics instructor and undergraduate statistics program coordinator, Leigh Harrell-Williams’ interests broadly include undergraduate and K-12 STEM education, with a focus in statistics and mathematics education. Her applied research interests include student and teacher attitudes and beliefs related to STEM fields and careers, evaluating the effectiveness of educational and psychological interventions, and instrument development and validation. Her longest collaboration involved the development and revision of, and validation of scores from, the Self-Efficacy for Teaching Statistics (SETS-HS, SETS-MS) instruments for use with middle grades and high school teachers and teacher candidates. Her recent collaborations on National Science Foundation (NSF) funded projects have focused on flipped classrooms in undergraduate statistics courses and a comprehensive teaching training program for mathematical sciences graduate teaching assistants/graduate student instructors (GTAs/GSIs) to develop their pedagogical skills to improve the outcomes of their current and future students. Additionally, her participation in the NSF-funded Learner Data Institute (LDI) fostered an interdisciplinary collaboration with computer science faculty and researchers at Carnegie Learning exploring K-12 students’ achievement goal profiles during use of a popular mathematics digital learning platform, MATHia.
Dr. Harrell-Williams is co-director of the University of Memphis Women+’s Mentorship Network and the 2022-2023 College of Education Faculty Fellow.
Education
Ph.D. Educational Research and Evaluation - Virginia Tech - 2009
M.S. Statistics - University of Georgia - 2004
B.A. Psychology and Liberal Arts Management Program - Virginia Wesleyan College -
1997