About UsWorking with Student EntrepreneursElizabeth Buckner Elizabeth has a background living and researching in the Middle East, and upon coming to Stanford, was interested in how she could get involved in work that with young people in the region. Initially, she had no plans to incorporate mobile devices into her work, but the opportunity to take a research trip in 2010 with Dr. Paul Kim to Israel and Palestine gave her the chance to blend her experience as a researcher with her passion for making a concrete difference in the lives of youth in in the Middle East.
PhD candidate Elizabeth Buckner is running a project to collect stories from Palestinian and Israeli children and turn them into audio slideshows that can be distributed in the region's schools on mobile devices. The small contraptions also play video games aimed at boosting a user's critical thinking skills.
Prior research suggests that exposure to conflict can negatively impact the development of executive functioning, which in turn can affect academic performance. Recognizing the need to better understand the potentially widespread executive function deficiencies among Palestinian students and to help develop educational resources targeted to youth in conflict-affected areas, we utilize mobile devices to assess correlates of executive functions among Palestinian youth from varied socioeconomic backgrounds.
PhD, International and Comparative Education, and Sociology and Education
Class of 2014
Stanford University School of Education
Interned with Dr. Paul Kim, CTO of the School of Education
A project to distribute mobile devices to Palestinian and Israeli schools contaning audio slideshows created from the stories of children in the region.
