Amber Rowland
- Courtesy Associate Professor
Contact Info
Biography —
Amber Rowland, PhD, is an Associate Research Professor with the Center for Research on Learning at the Life Span Institute, as well as a Courtesy Associate Professor for the Department of Special Education. She has collaborated with faculty and staff in the SOEHS for the last 20 years and taught in SPED for the last 10. She specializes in practical and engaging adult professional learning with an emphasis on current instructional practice and the powerful integration of technology. She is particularly interested in supporting professional learning at a distance and is constantly pursuing methods for tapping into the collective capacity of educators and students.
Her experiences range from Kindergarten to the college classroom where she has taught at multiple levels, both face-to-face and online. She has served as a technology integration specialist, project manager for the Technology Rich Classroom, Title IID initiative in Kansas, an instructor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas, Co-Director of the Literacy Network of Kansas, Co-Director of the Advanced Learning Technologies (ALTEC) Division of CRL, and the director of multiple federal, state, and local initiatives.
Dr. Rowland travels to local, state and national venues and conferences working with educators on digital-age instruction and the general integration of technology to support all learners, especially those who struggle. In 2008, Amber was recognized as one of the 20 emerging leaders in education technology by the National School Boards Association “20 to Watch” initiative and in 2016, she was recognized as a Kansas University, Woman of Distinction. In 2020, one of the articles her team wrote won the Technology in Action Article of the Year within the Journal of Special Education Technology and in 2021, the Kansas Striving Readers project that she helped secure and manage won the Literacy Legacy Award from Storytime Village in Kansas.
Research —
She serves as a Co-Principal Investigator on two Office of Special Education and Policy (OSEP)-funded, Stepping Up grants. The first is Project VOISS, which is building a virtual reality environment to teach students social competency skills and the teacher progress monitoring and professional learning needed to implement and generalize learned skills to the physical classroom. The second OSEP project is APLM-WRITE which is designing a online coaching platform to support professional developers and educators as they integrate WRITE, a progress monitoring tool that auto-scores student writing samples. In addition, she is a Co-Investigator on the IES-funded grant called Possible Selves + Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction project.
Selected Publications —
Rowland, A., Myers, S., Elford, M. & Smith, S. (2023). Coaching Virtually to Support Professional Learning. Journal of Special Education and Technology. 38(1).75-85. doi: 10.1177/01626434211036098
Carreon, A., Smith, S.J., Frey, B., Rowland, A. & Mosher, M. (2023) Comparing immersive VR and non-immersive VR on social skill acquisition for students in middle school with ASD. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, doi: 10.1080/15391523.2023.2182851
Myers, S., Rowland, A., Elford, M.D. (2022). Implementing a virtual coaching model for teacher professional development. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Carreon, A., Smith, S.J., Mosher, M., Rao, K. & Rowland, A. (2022). A Review of Virtual Reality Intervention Research for Students with Disabilities in K-12 Settings. Journal of Special Education and Technology. 37(1). 82-99. doi:10.1177/0162643420962011
Rowland, A., Smith, S.J., & Lowrey, A.K. (2021). Connecting Evidence-Based Writing Strategies with Readily Available Technology Solutions. TEACHING Exceptional Children. 53(3). 253-255. doi:10.1177/0040059920954778
Rowland, A., Smith, S. J., Lowrey, A.K. & Abdulrahim, N. A. (2020) Underutilized Technology Solutions for Student Writing. Intervention in School and Clinic. 56(2), 99-106. 10.1177/1053451220914893. Smith, S.J., Lowrey, A.K., Rowland, A. & Frey, B. (2020). Effective Technology Supported Writing Strategies for Learners with Disabilities. Inclusion. 8(1), 58-73. 10.1352/2326-6988-8.1.58.