Faculty Spotlight

Graduate School of Education Faculty Spotlight

The Faculty Spotlight highlights Graduate School of Education faculty members throughout the academic year. Each spotlight includes the research interests, scholarly accomplishments, and academic courses taught by the highlighted faculty member.

Chiu

Ming Ming Chiu

Ming Ming Chiu, Ph.D.
Professor

Department of Learning and Instruction
564 Baldy Hall
(716) 645-4067
mingchiu@buffalo.edu

Ming Ming Chiu has numerous research interests, including classroom conversations, country inequalities, and corporate corruption. While studying at Columbia (B.S.), Harvard (Ed.M.), and Berkeley (Ph.D.), he qualitatively examined cooperative learning among students. His proposals to statistically analyze student interactions won him a McDonnell Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA and a National Academy of Education fellowship at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Based on these proposals, Ming invented dynamic multilevel analysis (DMA) with Lawrence Khoo. DMA can statistically model traditional qualitative data such as conversations, individual problem solving, interviews, and therapy sessions. Hence, Ming has analyzed classroom interactions, parent-child interactions, and transactions among corporations.

Ming’s detailed models of classroom conversations can identify cause and effect relationships, help teachers make decisions, and enhance student learning. Specifically, he statistically identified conversation watersheds (e.g., insights, insults) that radically change classroom interactions. He also showed that student actions (e.g., polite disagreements, wrong ideas, correct evaluations) during the three previous conversation turns aided the subsequent creation of correct, new ideas (micro-creativity) during cooperative learning. Ming also described how teacher assessments of student progress opened doors to other teacher actions and improved students’ subsequent time-on-task and problem solving.

Beyond the classroom, Ming showed that greater family inequality reduces overall achievement while widening the rich-poor achievement gap. Four inequalities (family, school, economic segregation of students, and bias toward privileged students) operate through five inequality mechanisms (fewer public school resources, more corruption, less schoolmate friendships, more discipline problems, and diminishing marginal returns). Understanding broader contexts can improve family, school, and national educational policies and practices to aid student learning.

Beyond education, Ming analyzes corporate interactions. He invented multilevel diffusion analysis and used it to detect corruption in the music industry. Ming also analyzes corruption in Japanese banks and in Korean corporations. Furthermore, he studies cultural values, cultural capital, job satisfaction, music creativity, online discussions, sense of belonging, and school competition.

Ming has disseminated his research through teaching and publications. He previously earned three Outstanding Teacher awards at CUHK, and he currently teaches mathematics education courses at UB (e.g., Problem Solving, Mathematics Teaching, Assessing Mathematics). Ming has published in the top journals in numerous fields, including sociology (Sociological Methodology), psychology (Journal of Family Psychology), communication (Human Communication Research), administration (Journal of Educational Administration), and education (American Educational Research Journal). Funded by 22 grants totaling over $3.7 million, Ming’s work has appeared in 44 journal articles, 6 book chapters, 14 radio broadcasts, and 109 news articles in 12 countries.

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