The Baylor School of Education is celebrating four faculty members who received tenure this spring, with promotion to associate professor status in the fall:

Dr. Nathan Alleman, Department of Educational Administration
Dr. Karon LeCompte, Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Dr. Grant Morgan, Department of Educational Psychology
Dr. Rishi Sriram, Department of Educational Administration

Alleman, who earned a PhD from the College of William and Mary in 2008 and a master’s in higher education from Geneva College in 2002, specializes in the study of higher and postsecondary education. He joined the Baylor faculty in 2010.

Alleman’s research interests and expertise address the study — often from a sociological perspective — of the American professoriate, faith-based colleges and universities, and college students. He has also focused research on marginalized groups and institutions in higher education. He has published recently on the legal and collegiate social status of undocumented college students, the role of rural communities in the preparation of low-income students for college, and the importance of school-university partnerships in promoting college attendance and success.

He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, a handful of policy reports and books reviews, and has a book due out this year.

“Dr. Alleman’s research casts fresh light on some long-standing assumptions in the field,” said School of Education Dean Dr. Michael McLendon. “He raises important questions around ways Christian colleges and universities can innovate, adapt and renew themselves.”

Alleman is involved in a variety of professional associations, serving as chair of sessions at the annual meetings of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), the leading research association in the country with a focus on higher education, and conducting reviews for journals as well as for ASHE and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

LeCompte earned a PhD from the University of Texas in Austin in 2002, after earning her master’s from Sam Houston State University in 1996. Prior to joining the Baylor faculty in 2010, she spent seven years as an assistant clinical professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development.

LeCompte’s scholarship focuses on elementary civics education and distinctively on “action civics,” an approach to civics education that emphasizes civic engagement by students at all levels. With co-principal investigator Dr. Brooke Blevins of the School of Education, LeCompte has received grants to underwrite both her scholarship and a community outreach program of the national civics-education curriculum iCivics. Through summer camps on the Baylor campus, LeCompte and Blevins provide civic engagement experiences for students while they gather research data and provide professional development for teachers and teacher candidates.

While at Baylor, LeCompte has published frequently on these topics in top-tier journals in the field, presents regularly at national conferences, and teaches classes in social studies education and in the School of Education’s minor program in Leadership Studies.

“By hosting the iEngage camps on the Baylor campus each summer, Dr. LeCompte and her team provide a most valuable service to those school districts in which funding and curriculum relating to citizenship education often are rare or non-existent,” McLendon said.

LeCompte serves Baylor as faculty-in-residence in the Leadership Living-Learning Center. She also serves as co-sponsor for the Baylor chapter of Kappa Delta Pi and was honored as KDPi’s Outstanding Regional Counselor.

Morgan completed his PhD in the research and measurement track of the Educational Psychology and Research Program at the University of South Carolina and his master’s degree in human resources management from Western Carolina University. He came to Baylor in 2012 with eight years of professional research experience both in the private sector and university settings.

Morgan is an applied quantitative methodologist whose research involves advanced statistical methods primarily in the field of education, but also in areas such as community health and health care. His scholarship focuses on measurement problems, psychometrics, latent variable modeling, and classification. He has investigated teacher performance evaluation systems, measurements used in student testing, health behaviors, models of intelligence, among other issues.

“Dr. Morgan possesses quantitative methodological expertise that is at once enormously valuable and too-rarely present at many schools of education,” said McLendon. “The quality of his scholarship, as evidenced by its placement in prestigious, impactful journals, is quite high.”

Morgan’s research articles have appeared in Structural Equation Modeling, Psychological Assessment, Journal of Applied Measurement and Methodology, Intelligence, and Journal of Personality Assessment.

Morgan has twice received the Bruce Thompson Outstanding Paper Award from the Southwest Educational Research Association and won several research awards as a PhD student. He is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education.

Sriram earned his PhD in higher education at Azusa Pacific University and both his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Baylor. He served in numerous staff positions in Baylor departments including Campus Living and Learning, where he was Assistant Dean of Student Learning and Engagement. Sriram joined the School of Education faculty in 2010.

Sriram’s research focuses on the study of higher and postsecondary education. His scholarship is distinctive in its focus on translational research aiming to improve the practice of student-affairs administrators and in its reliance of quantitative research methods to do so.

“Dr. Sriram’s scholarship is original, timely, well conceptualized, tightly focused and yielding of crucial insights for student-affairs administrators at all types of colleges and universities,” McLendon said. “He has become recognized within his field as a talented, rising scholar whose research on students and student-affairs practice is poised to make important contributions in the study of higher education.”

Sriram is graduate program director for the Department of Educational Administration and director of the master’s program in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA). He also led the design and implementation of the university’s first PhD program in Higher Education Studies. Since 2013, Sriram has served as Faculty Master of Brooks College, an undergraduate residential community of nearly 400 students.

Sriram serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice and as chair of the Graduate Education and Research Commission for the Texas Association of College and University Student Personnel Administrators (TACUSPA).

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