Each year, the College of Education grants the Hardie Dissertation Award, a competitive award that offers financial support to graduate students as they complete their doctoral dissertations. These awards are funded through the generosity of the alumni and friends of the College, including the Hardie Endowment.

Student applications are judged by the following evaluation criteria: importance to the field, methodological soundness, student's capacity to carry out the project, appropriateness of budget, and feasibility of work plan. Successful proposals clearly state the significance of the research for the field of education, broadly defined, and clearly describe the study's methodology and implementation.

Recipients of the Hardie awards receive $2,000 to support completion of their dissertation. The program is supported by the Charles Dunn Hardie Trust.

Winners of the 2013 Hardie Dissertation Awards, the departments in which they are enrolled, and their areas of research are:

• Jeonghwan Choi, EPOL, The Effect of Autonomous Work Environment and Positive Psychological Capital on Self-Directed Employee Behavior: Evidence from Korea
• Anna DeJarnette, C&I, Collaborative Learning of Geometry in a Technology-Based Setting Research Problem and Significance
• Lisa Delarue, Educational Psychology, The Influence of Family, Friends, and Community on Girl's Delinquency: A Social Network Analysis
• Xuefei Gao, Educational Psychology, The Effects of Aging and Interference Control in Working Memory on Perceptual Simulation in Online Situation Model Construction
• Cristin Geoghegan, C&I, Where Will You Go Next With Your Instruction? Understanding Formative Assessment in the Context of Literacy
• Seung Won Hong, EPOL, An Exploratory Study of the Relationships among Job Context Factors, Information-Seeking Behaviors,Work Engagement, and Future Role Intent among Employees with Project Management Responsibilities
• Rhonda Jamison, Educational Psychology, Teacher-Student Relationships across the Middle School Transition
• Elzbieta Kazmierczak, EPOL, Interpreting Abuse from Self-Representational Drawings: A Mixed-Method Study
• Gabriela Romero, C&I, Voices within Sitios y Lenguas: Looking at Spaces and Languages of Learning in a Bilingual Classroom
• Yi Zheng, Educational Psychology, New Methods of Online Calibration for Item Bank Replenishment