Biography

Andrea Nixon is a program officer in the Division of Graduate Education at the National Science Foundation.  She currently works with programs including the Education and Human Resources Core Research (EHR Core), Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (BCSER), STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, and the Racial Equity Program Description.

Prior to her retirement from Carleton College, Dr. Nixon was the Director of Educational Research. Concurrently from 2016 through the beginning of 2021, Andrea also served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources and the Division of Undergraduate Education. She was Co-Lead for the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Program. She also served as a program director for the Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM); Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship programs; and EHR Core Research (ECR) programs. She served in a the Directorate-wide Racial Equity Task Force and Foundation-wide Midscale Research Infrastructure (R1) Working Group. Prior to that, Andrea she served as an invited expert to President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) on data use to inform effective educational uses of technology in higher education. She served on the External Advisory Committee for MIT's Online Education Policy Initiative. She was a founding co-director of the Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning (LACOL); a partnership among Amherst College, Carleton College, Claremont McKenna College, Haverford College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Vassar College and Williams College. Andrea has served on a variety of EDUCAUSE committees including the Security Task Force - Policies and Legal Issues Working Group, is a former chair of the Advisory Committee on Teaching and Learning, member of an EDUCAUSE annual conference planning committee, and Director of EDUCAUSE's Learning Technologies Leadership Institute. A longtime employee of Carleton College, Andrea led the development of the College's Coordinated Support Model, a collaborative venture among faculty, students, librarians, instructional technologists, and other academic support professionals. The model is designed to provide effective curricular and research support measured through student and faculty success. Starting in 1990 she served as a computing lab manager, academic technologist and then administrator in the College's IT organization. She wrote of her early experiences in a 1999 article for CAUSE/EFFECT titled 'Discipline-Focused Technology Support Fosters Curriculum Innovation.' Andrea received her Ph.D. from the Department of Educational Policy and Administration at the University of Minnesota. Her research has included both policy analysis and educational research. Her dissertation research examined the role of institutional copyright policy on the development of curricular materials for online instruction. Her collaborative research included "Curricular Uses of Visual Materials: A Mixed-Method Institutional Study." The central research question of this study was: Are the sources of support that the College provides well suited to the work demanded of students and faculty as they make curricular use of visual materials? Her research at Carleton included the 1) Student Engagement with Academic Support (SEAS) longitudinal study that examined student behaviors as they work on course assignments and 2) collaborative projects focused on the ways in which online learning materials can be used to greatest effect in residential liberal arts settings.