PhD Candidate in the Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a minor in Gender and Women Studies
As a child, Ali and his family immigrated to the United States from Pakistan and settled in Englewood, New Jersey. As a proud New Jerseyan, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, followed by a Master’s degree in Biological Science Education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. After graduating, he taught high school biology and also worked at Khan Academy as a biology content fellow.
Currently, he’s a PhD candidate in the SESAME program at UC Berkeley where his research focuses on how we can make undergraduate STEM education more inclusive, interpersonal, and interdisciplinary. He specializes in assessment, evaluation, and design-based research. In his dissertation research, Ali is measuring the development of “Innovation Skills” in undergraduate students taking a course called “Bioinspired Design.” In this course, students work in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams to solve design problems in society with design solutions inspired by nature.
Ali is a practicing Muslim and firmly believes in the mutually reinforcing nature of Islam and science. In his free time, he loves watching and playing sports, so you can catch him on the basketball court missing wide-open shots or turning off the TV in frustration as his favorite teams (Nets & Mets) maintain their mediocrity.
My research focuses on the assessment of student learning within a project-based course called “Bioinspired Design.” In this course, open to all majors and all years, students work in interdisciplinary teams to translate authentic scientific discoveries from primary literature into societally beneficial bioinspired designs. I’m interested in research questions such as: How do we know this course is actually working? Is it working for all students? What can we measure to support this? Why should we measure that and not something else? How should we measure this? These questions stem from the fact that educators inevitably face the task of preparing students for future careers that do not yet exist. A recent report by the National Bureau of Economic Research stated that 74% of employment amongst professionals in 2018 was found in job titles that did not exist in 1940 (Autor et al., 2022). Thus, educators at all levels of teaching are faced with a pressing question—how do we prepare the students of today for the unknown jobs of tomorrow? As science educators, it is imperative that we prepare all students, STEM and non-STEM, for future workforce pivoting through pedagogy that promotes the development of transferable STEM skills (NASEM, 2021). One of the most critical skills needed in the future is innovation. The ability to innovate has consistently been ranked as the most important skill for the future workforce (WEF, 2020) and thus, it is crucial for us to not only foster this skill in undergraduate students, but also robustly assess the development of this skill. To this end, my specific assessment research focuses on developing and measuring “Innovation Skills” in undergraduate students as they progress through the “Bioinspired Design” course. I utilize an assessment framework based on the Four Building Blocks of Assessment (Wilson, 2023) to develop and validate instruments that measure student growth. Through this “scientific approach to assessment” (Bhatti et al., 2023), I use construct modeling and statistical analyses based on item response theory (IRT) to assess the development of students’ “Innovation Skills.” Importantly, I recognize that student development occurs within both the cognitive and affective domains of learning, and thus, my assessment research measures both of these overlapping perspectives.