Shondricka Burrell is a PhD candidate in the College of Education at Temple University where she has engaged in quasi-experimental research in K-12 and college settings. As a research assistant under the mentorship of Doug Lombardi, Shondricka has investigated instructional scaffolds designed to support critical thinking, evidence-based reasoning, plausibility reappraisal, and scientific explanation in secondary Earth and Space science students. She has also been part of a collaboration between the College of Education and the College of Science and Technology at Temple University investigating math mentoring as a retention strategy for undergraduate geology majors. Shondricka’s dissertation research is an extension of this work in geoscience education but is more specifically motivated by issues of educational access, environmental justice, science contextualized in the lived experience of students, and science for problem solving. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical methods, she is exploring place-based transformative learning, student interest development, and self-beliefs of competence. Shondricka has been recognized for her research receiving the Richard C. Anderson Graduate Student Research Award from the National Consortium for Instruction and Cognition, and a graduate student research grant from the Geological Society of America. Shondricka has also been named a Jhumki Basu Scholar by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) and is a Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE) fellow.