Researcher of adolescents' digital literacies, videogaming and learning.
Sandra Schamroth Abrams, Ph.D., is a trusted source for educators and parents who are interested in understanding how youth today make meaning and navigate the ever-changing technological landscape.
Her research of videogaming focuses on adolescents’ identities and practices developed, maintained, and modified in and across social and academic settings. Through the close examination of power structures, gaming principles, and spatial design, her work provides insight into agentive learning located in collaboration, variation, iteration, and ideation. More specifically, her longitudinal study of game-based learning reveals a layering of literacies deeply rooted in the seamless movement among modalities and resources across digital and nondigital spaces. These discoveries of students’ evolving knowledge landscapes have informed additional qualitative and mixed methods research of adaptive resources, adolescent learning, and technological integration.
Overall, Abrams’s work suggests that the nuances of digital worlds and gaming practices can disrupt convention, promote social responsibility, and provide new avenues for pedagogical discovery. She is the author of Integrating Virtual and Traditional Learning in 6-12 Classrooms: A Layered Literacies Approach to Multimodal Meaning Making (Routledge), co-author of Conducting Qualitative Research of Learning in Online Spaces (SAGE), Managing Educational Technology: School Partnerships and Technology Integration (Routledge), and Writing in Education: The Art of Writing for Educators (Brill), and co-editor of Parent-Child Research Reimagined (Brill) and Bridging Literacies with Videogames (Sense/Brill). Forthcoming co-authored books include Videogames, Libraries, and the Feedback Loop: Learning Beyond the Stacks (Emerald) and An Integrated Mixed Methods Approach to Nonverbal Communication Data: A Practical Guide to Collection and Analysis in Online and Offline Spaces (Routledge). Abrams also is a co-editor of the Gaming and Ecologies Series and is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches. Other recent publications are featured in Teachers College Record, The Reading Teacher, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and the Journal of Media Literacy Education.
Educational Background
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Ph.D. Education, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2009
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M.A. English Education, New York University, 2000
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M.A. Literature, American University, 1999
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B.A. English, Washington University, St. Louis, 1998