Four faculty members and their research teams have received a College of Behavioral and Community Sciences (CBCS) Internal Grant Award. These grants are awarded annually to support research that shows promise for externally sponsored research funding.
Principal Investigator Caralin Branscum, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, with co-investigators Sarah Lockwood, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, and Jacob Gray, PhD, assistant research professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies, was awarded funding to partner with the Pasco County Commission on Human Trafficking to evaluate a newly developed human trafficking awareness curriculum for K–12 public and charter school employees. The curriculum was created in response to Florida House Bill 1237, which mandates trafficking awareness training for school personnel. During the 2026–2027 academic year, the project will assess the overall effectiveness and implementation of the district-specific training program within educational settings. The goals of the project are to strengthen school-based responses to human trafficking, evaluate the long-term impacts of awareness training among educators and generate research that informs future policy, scholarly publications and external funding opportunities.
MarÃa Carlo, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies and principal investigator, with co-investigators Matthew Foster, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies; Elizabeth Schotter, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Psychology; and Noé Erazo, PhD, program manager in the Department of Child and Family Studies, aims to establish a new line of research at the Rightpath Research Center using eye-tracking technology to examine how language proficiency interacts with text processing during real-time reading. This work will establish a research program to examine how oral-language instructional supports influence the quality of learners’ word representations in memory and the efficient access to and integration of these representations during reading. The goals of this work are to strengthen the team’s expertise in eye-tracking methodology, replicate a classic eye-movement reading paradigm to generate aligned research materials and pilot data, and prepare a National Institutes of Health (NIH) small research grant using eye-tracking technology to study the effect of oral-language supports during reading.
Matthew Foster, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies and principal investigator, with co-investigators MarÃa Carlo, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies, and Noé Erazo, PhD, program manager in the Department of Child and Family Studies, will examine the feasibility and promise of a low-dosage, scalable bilingual oral language intervention (Story Champs Bilingual Edition 2.0) for Spanish-speaking English learners in two underserved rural communities. This pilot study uses a randomized controlled trial to test a personnel-flexible model in which trained non-educator staff deliver structured storytelling sessions to strengthen academic vocabulary, narrative organization and sentence complexity in Spanish and English. The project will evaluate implementation fidelity under authentic school constraints and generate preliminary effect-size estimates for oral language outcomes, with exploratory analyses of cross-domain associations in early literacy, math, and science. Findings will inform a subsequent federally funded efficacy trial and advance NSF priorities to promote equity, strengthen the science of learning, and support scalable educational design.
Principal Investigator SooHyun O, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, with co-investigator YongJei Lee, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, will apply a multilevel opportunity framework that distinguishes retaliatory norms (retaliation for self-protection) from general toughness norms (status-seeking toughness) and tests when these beliefs translate into delinquency and victimization. Using a student survey with students nested within schools, the researchers will model norm-to-victimization mechanisms through delinquency and delinquent peers and assess whether guardianship in risky micro-settings, school efficacy, and perceived justice amplify or buffer these pathways using moderated mediation in multilevel count models. In parallel, the team will develop an AI/computer-vision pipeline to extract defensible-space and routine-activity indicators from street-level imagery and spatial layers within school buffers, create interpretable indices (visibility/surveillance and territoriality), and pilot-link them to Sarasota youth crime data. The goals of the project are to administer a multi-wave survey to a nested sample of students, teachers, and staff across more than 110 schools; develop and validate the school-context measures needed to test cross-school differences in risk (guardianship in risky micro-settings, school efficacy, and perceived justice) alongside individual-level indicators of the two distinct subcultural norms; and establish a partnership with the Sarasota Police Department to support a Sarasota pilot of AI-derived built-environment measurement.
CBCS provided between $5,000 and $20,000 in funding for each project, with the amount of the award determined based on justification, other sources of funding, and the availability of college funds.