Honors and Awards

By Sala Levin ’10

In 2000 and again in 2010, Congress asked the U.S. Department of Education to conduct a nationwide study on the status of arts education in schools—information advocates used to argue for broader access to horizon-expanding activities ranging from watercolor painting to singing in the school musical.

After no such study was mandated in 2020, Kenneth Elpus, associate professor of music education in the University of Maryland’s School of Music, realized an arts education researcher would need to take on the task. Now, with $150,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elpus is launching a research lab at UMD that will survey 4,000 K-12 public schools to learn about their educational programming across music, theater, dance and visual arts.

“Most efforts to collect data about the educational system in the U.S. are geared toward making reading, writing and math learning legible—so that we understand student engagement and success in those subjects. Teachers and school administrators use that data as a guidepost for setting policy and improving instruction,” said Elpus. “But when you look at the work of educating a child, there’s a lot more in preparing humans for the world than how well they read, write and do math.”

Without a recent federal study of the standing of American arts education, administrators, teachers and supporters have lacked data on trends and major changes, especially amid the disruption to schools caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. (Imagine trying to teach a middle school orchestra virtually.) That data, said Elpus, is crucial to advocates as they work to increase access to arts education and to arts educators as they strive to improve arts learning.

Elpus will examine questions like: Who’s taking arts classes? Who’s teaching them? How much funding does arts education receive? How many classes and extracurricular activities are offered? How has COVID-19 changed teaching and learning? Partner organizations including the National Association for Music Education and the National Art Education Association will help connect Elpus to educators across the country to craft survey questions that will illuminate the issues, and to distribute the survey.

Yan Li, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the School of Public Health and professor in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, is serving as statistician and methodologist on the project, while four graduate students are also supported by the grant. Funding for the lab also comes from the School of Music, the College of Arts and Humanities and the Division of Research.

Elpus hopes the data will help influence legislative decisions and funding for primary and secondary arts education. “Very few people would ever … want to deny (a student) the opportunity for aesthetic and emotional understanding, but in the way that education works in the U.S., the decisions are made by policymakers who want to be informed by data,” he said. “When we collect and analyze high-quality data on arts education, then we have a stronger position from which to effect positive change in education policy.”

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Barbara Haggh-Huglo, professor of musicology in the University of Maryland School of Music, was elected an honorary member of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the largest musicological organization in the world. Honorary members are those scholars “who have made outstanding contributions to furthering its stated object and whom the Society wishes to honor.” The award is the highest honor of the AMS, reserved for the most esteemed of scholars.
 
Haggh-Huglo, who specializes in medieval and Renaissance music, has conducted extensive research in libraries and archives across Europe and the British Isles, as well as in the United States and Mexico, and has published widely on the music and musicians of northwest Europe from 800–1600. The AMS called Haggh-Huglo “a committed pedagogue.”
 
The “author of over 100 articles and chapters, Dr. Haggh-Huglo is a reservoir of knowledge on medieval and Renaissance music whose expertise has made for a significant international presence and enduring impact at her institution,” the AMS statement said.
 
Haggh-Huglo became immersed in the history of medieval music thanks in large part to her multilingual upbringing; by the time she was 20, she read English, French and German and had taken lessons in Dutch. During her doctoral research at the University of Illinois, she took several research trips to Europe and began working with early archives.
 
In Lille, France, Haggh-Huglo found documents to prove that Guillaume Du Fay, considered by many the greatest composer of the 15th century, composed a day’s worth of plainchant, or music with a single melodic line.
 
“No one had known about it and still, to this day, it is an exception in the history of music because we don’t know of any well-known composer of choral music who also composed chant,” Haggh-Huglo said.
 
She went on to write the first histories of music in the cities of late medieval Brussels and Ghent in her dissertation and articles, and later became known for her editions and studies of pre-modern plainchant offices, which were sung from one evening to the next in churches and told the lives of patron saints. During her research on offices, she rediscovered a lost 15th-century office used by the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece.
 
Haggh-Huglo has also published articles on topics ranging from Old Hispanic and Irish chant to German radio dramas of the 1950s and 1960s.
 
She has been at the University of Maryland since 2000, where she has taught courses on early music, notation and theory, research methods, and the survey of music history. She will teach a course on music, art and architecture from Vitruvius to the present for the first time in Spring 2022.
 
Her forthcoming three-volume book is “Recollecting the Virgin Mary with Music: Guillaume Du Fay's Chant across Five Centuries.” She will lecture about the book to the Belgian Academy of Sciences next spring.
 
“This was very unexpected and I am deeply honored,” Haggh-Huglo said about the award. “I have dedicated my life to this scholarship and this puts me in the company of a very elite group of people in the field. I hope this distinction will help me to continue and encourage others to pursue this research.”

By Maryland Today Staff 

While the world contended with a pandemic, social media platforms and other sources spewed billions of misleading health messages at users—more than 3.8 billion times on Facebook over the course of a year, according to one study—a dynamic that University of Maryland researchers and their colleagues say can lead to adverse public health outcomes ranging from mistrust in reliable information sources to deaths from disease.

Now, these risk communication experts in the Department of Communication and at the University of Georgia (UGA) are collaborating with researchers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop and test messaging strategies that can help overcome misinformation during public health emergencies.

Supported by a three-year, nearly $225,000 award from the FDA, communication Professor Brooke Fisher Liu and Yan Jin, professor of public relations and Georgia Athletic Association professor at UGA, will develop and test message strategies concerning vital health information that can help keep people safe.

“Past research found a clear link between COVID-19 misinformation exposure and vaccine hesitancy,” said Liu, the project’s principal investigator. “Research also connects misinformation exposure to lower compliance with government health and safety guidance. In short, misinformation is just as great of a threat to public health as the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, but our knowledge is limited on how to combat misinformation.”

The researchers will be among the first to explore how public health misinformation can be corrected through strategic risk communication and what methods work best in thwarting misinformation. They will conduct two large-scale online experiments on how messages containing misinformation and various types of corrective responses are interpreted by U.S. adults.

“This project exemplifies the importance and promising future for more collaborative risk and crisis communication research across universities and with the government to provide theory-driven, evidenced-based insights to protect public health and safety,” said Jin, co-principal investigator.

Liu and Jin’s research collaborations date back to 2001, when they both studied in the graduate program at the Missouri School of Journalism. Now they are joined by graduate research assistants Tori McDermott from UMD, and Xuerong Lu from UGA.

In addition to the experimental results, the research team will also provide a targeted deep-dive analysis of previous research, and will recommend best practices for how public health agencies can combat health misinformation for current and future threats.

This article was adapted from a news release by the University of Georgia.

There are myriad benefits to learning a new language—from conversing with people from other backgrounds, to easing international travel, to advancing your career. But acquiring a new language as an adult is not always easy, particularly if a person is trying to distinguish phonetic sounds not often heard in their native language.

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Laboratory at the University of Maryland are exploring this phenomenon, using computational modeling to investigate learning mechanisms that can help listeners adapt their speech perception of a new language.

Naomi Feldman (left), an associate professor of linguistics with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, is principal investigator of the $496K grant(link is external).

Feldman is overseeing five students in the CLIP Lab who are heavily involved in the project, including two who are pictured below. Craig Thorburn(link is external) (right), is a fourth-year doctoral student in linguistics, and Saahiti Potluri (left), is an undergraduate double majoring in applied mathematics and finances.

For their initial work, the researchers are taking a closer look at the specific difficulties native Japanese speakers face when learning English.

As an adult, it is often difficult to alter the speech categories that people have experienced since childhood, particularly as it relates to non-native or unfamiliar speech sounds. For example, native English speakers can easily distinguish between the “r” and “l” sound, which native Japanese speakers are not accustomed to.

Feldman’s research team is developing two types of computational models based on adult perceptual learning data: probabilistic cue weighting models, which are designed to capture fast, trial-by-trial changes in listeners’ reliance on different parts of the speech signal; and reinforcement learning models, which are designed to capture longer term, implicit perceptual learning of speech sounds. Thorburn and Potluri are working on the latter models.

With guidance from Feldman, the two researchers are exploring a reward-based mechanism that research suggests is particularly effective in helping adults acquire difficult sound contrasts when learning a second language.

“We're trying to uncover the precise mechanism that makes learning so effective in this paradigm,” Thorburn says. “This appears to be a situation in which people are able to change what they learned as an infant, something we refer to as having plasticity—the ability of the brain to adapt—in one’s representations. If we can pin down what is happening in this experiment, then we might be able understand what causes plasticity more generally.”

Potluri says that the powerful computational resources provided by UMIACS are critical to the project, noting that the model they are working with goes through hundreds of audio clips and “learns” over thousands of trials.

“The lab's servers can run these experiments in a matter of hours. Whereas with less computational power, it would literally take days to run a single experiment,” she says. “After running the model, we also need to analyze the massive datasets generated by the trials, and they are easier to store and manipulate—without concerning memory issues—on the lab's servers.”

Potluri says it was her interest in learning languages and a desire to get involved in linguistics research that drew her to apply to work in CLIP as an undergraduate. Despite having very little previous coursework in the subject, she and Feldman found that the NSF-funded project was a great area for her to exercise her knowledge in math while gaining new skills.

Feldman says the complementary skill sets of Thorburn and Potluri make them a good team to assist on the project.

“Craig and Saahiti have interests that are very interdisciplinary—spanning everything from language science to computer science to applied math—which makes them a perfect fit for research that uses computational models to study how people learn language,” she says. “Their collaborative work has already proven to be very impressive, and I am glad to have them on our team.”

—Story by Melissa Brachfeld

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Starting next summer, University of Maryland language scholars will have a new place to conduct their research and a new source of participants for their studies: the Planet Word museum in downtown Washington, D.C. and its visitors.

A new $440,000 grant from the National Science Foundation funds a partnership between UMD, Howard University and Gallaudet University and Planet Word to advance research and public understanding about the science of language.

For example, experiments may look at what non-signing people believe about what makes various American Sign Language signs hard or easy to learn, why it’s easier to understand the speech of people we know rather than strangers, or whether we think differently when reading a text message versus formal writing.

The experiments will be interactive and fun, said Assistant Research Professor in UMD’s Maryland Language Science Center Charlotte Vaughn, who is leading the project.

“Language is already the topic of conversation at the museum, so there’s an unparalleled opportunity for our studies and activities about language science to be a seamless and memorable part of visitors’ experience,” she said.

Planet Word, opened in late 2020 and housed in the historic Franklin School building, aims to show the depth, breadth and fun of words, language and reading. Faculty from UMD’s Maryland Language Science Center, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and the Department of English were involved in shaping the museum’s vision and programming. It has been a hope of the museum’s founder, Ann Friedman, to also have it be a space for research and discovery.

In addition to Vaughn, the lead project team includes Associate Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Yi Ting Huang and postdoc affiliate in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Julie Cohen at UMD, as well as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Howard University Patrick Plummer and Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Gallaudet University Deanna Gagne. Other personnel include Jan Edwards and Rochelle Newman, both professors in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at UMD; Colin Phillips, professor in the Department of Linguistics at UMD; and Laura Wagner, professor in the Department of Psychology at the Ohio State University.

Vaughn said the opportunity to partner with a historically Black university and the world's only liberal arts university for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people will allow for significant progress on issues central to the field.

“Engaging the diverse Planet Word audience in our activities will make our research stronger, more representative, and more widely accessible,” Vaughn said. “At the same time, our collaborative partnership, plus offering unique research experiences to students underrepresented in the field, works toward diversifying the future of the language sciences.”

The grant also funds the development of a training course in public-facing research, which will be offered for the first time at Planet Word next summer. Though offered through UMD, the course will be open to students from across the region. Those who take part will help lead the research studies, set to begin around the same time.

“Participating in public-facing research is an excellent opportunity for students,” said Huang. “Communicating science to broad audiences involves developing ways to hook people into engaging with questions when they have limited familiarity with the topic and unraveling scientific puzzles through the format of conversations.”