Deoksoon Kim’s research focuses on understanding the needs of immigrant students in order to help them learn English and succeed in school. She also investigates how to use instructional technology to facilitate language and subject matter learning. She has done research on gender and immigration, formative education, and STEM teaching and learning.
After beginning her academic career as a teacher in Korea—where she established a school for teaching English to inner-city children in low-income districts in Seoul—Kim worked with pre-service teachers in Florida, helping them serve English language learners more effectively. For her undergraduate teaching, she was awarded both the Florida Outstanding Educator Award from the Florida TESOLAssociation and the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from theUniversity of South Florida.
In 2016, the Journal of Second Language Writing honored Kim with the Best ArticleAward for a publication about using technology to help with collaborative writing tasks. Recently she also received the best paper award from the American Educational Research Association, Online Teaching and Learning SIG, for a study that investigates how faculty members can teach the whole person online. The follow-up study is published in the AERA Open journal. She has carried out many research projects, including one that assessed immigrant children’s strategies for learning English—providing teachers with guidance on helping these students read more effectively.
Together with a research team from MIT, she has worked to implement science curricula centered around invention in the Waltham MA School district, with a focus on modifying curricula for English language learners. She is currently working on a hydroponic Green House project with Waltham schools. She is also a research team member with CityConnects, studying how this intervention works with immigrant, English language learners.
