Dr. Lily Davidov, Rio Salado College
Dr. Lily Davidov is the Faculty Chair for Accounting, Entrepreneurship, Risk Management & Insurance, and Small Business at Rio Salado College. She is credited with over 20 years of expertise in entrepreneurship, college instruction, executive administration, accounting and finance, strategic planning, curriculum development, and facilitation. Dr. Davidov comes from a long heritage of international entrepreneurs and is fluent in Russian.
She is currently studying the effectiveness of incorporating 21st Century Skills micro-credential (badges) into courses as a co-curricular (optional/non-graded) and (mandated/graded) learning activity. Incorporating badge earning into courses may translate into higher retention, completion, and job-ready graduates. In addition to the established curriculum in business studies, online students will have the opportunity to demonstrate skills and competencies in real-time. Furthermore, students may better understand the most in-demand skills that are transferable across multiple industries, which may drive student engagement and create relevance to career opportunities.
Jason Farrington, Paradise Valley Community College
Jason Farrington is a residential faculty member in the mathematics department at Paradise Valley Community College. He earned a B.A. in political science from Southern Utah University in 1999 and a J.D. in 2002 from the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. After practicing law for 12 years as a corporate bankruptcy attorney, he became a math teacher at Higley High School in Gilbert, Arizona in 2014 and joined the faculty at PVCC in 2021. He earned his M.Ed in secondary education from Arizona State University in 2016 and his M.S. in mathematics from Grand Canyon University in 2019. He is now in his fourth year of a PhD program in mathematics education at ASU, where his research broadly involves making mathematics accessible to all students and is currently focused on retrieval practice in undergraduate mathematics.
Jason’s research project is focused on further developing a learning tool that he calls a “learning inventory.” Learning inventories ask students to recall from memory and reflect upon at least two things that they learned in a previous lesson. Prior research suggests that low-stakes retrieval practice activities like learning inventories can improve retention of mathematical knowledge as well as transfer of mathematical reasoning from one context to another. The goal of this research fellowship is to explore ways to improve student engagement with the learning inventories in both in-person and online modalities.
Dr. Amanda Hundley, Estrella Mountain Community College
Dr. Amanda Hundley is a nursing faculty member at Estrella Mountain Community College. She has been a nurse for 23 years. She started teaching nursing students in 2010. Her practice experience is in cardiovascular intensive care and emergency trauma. Dr. Hundley has extensive experience in simulation and clinical learning.
She is conducting a mixed-methods research study to evaluate how experiential learning impacts clinical judgment in nursing students. The information from the study can be used to inform nurse educators how experiential learning in the classroom impacts students' clinical judgment.
Dr. Krysten Pampel, Glendale Community College
Dr. Krysten Pampel has been a residential faculty member in the mathematics department at Glendale Community College (GCC) since 2017. She is an alumnus of GCC, earned her master's degree in adult education and training from the University of Phoenix, and earned her Ph.D. in undergraduate mathematics education at Arizona State University. She began her career in education in 2009 as a dual enrollment high school math teacher in the Tolleson Union High School District and began teaching college courses in Fall 2012 for Paradise Valley Community College.
She is currently studying the effectiveness of oral examinations on entry-level STEM students from MAT151: College Algebra classes. She hopes to show how having students prepare and take an oral examination for each chapter will assist them in creating a deeper understanding of the concepts which will, in turn, show that the students score higher overall on exams. The project seeks to answer the following question: What effect do oral examinations have on students’ retention of mathematical concepts?
Vanessa Sandoval, Chandler-Gilbert Community College
Vanessa Sandoval is a residential faculty member at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, where she has taught COM100 Introduction to Communication, COM110 Interpersonal Communication, COM225 Public Speaking, COM230 Small Group Communication, COM263 Intercultural Communication, and COM282AC Volunteerism for Speech Communication: A Service-Learning Experience. Most of her teaching has been in the classroom (in-person), although she has also taught hybrid, online, and live online. For over twenty years, Vanessa has enjoyed teaching a variety of classes in different modalities, with ten years of team teaching in learning communities and over twenty years with incorporating service-learning into her classes.
Accessibility has been an overall focus of her work at CGCC, which she channeled into promoting and scheduling hybrid and online offerings over 15 years ago and then utilizing a free public speaking textbook in the fall of 2015. More recently, she worked with CGCC OER representatives and found an OER textbook for COM100 Introduction to Communication. COM225 and COM100 are CGCC’s largest offerings in Communication, so the OER impact has large financial savings as well as making the materials accessible from day one. In addition, an OER text was adopted for COM110 Interpersonal Communication just last year. Her research goal is to understand how inclusivity impacts CGCC student’s perceptions and preferences when understanding and utilizing textbook chapters and materials. Specifically, she is interested in OER Communication materials and how the visual representation in those materials make a difference to students.
Her educational background consists of a Bachelor of Arts with a Communication Major and a Mexican American Studies Minor from the University of Arizona; a Master of Education from Northern Arizona University; and a Master of Arts in Applied Communication from Northern Arizona University.