Rate My Professor Virginia Snodgrass

Virginia Snodgrass Rangel is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Houston College of Education. Her research examines how students from K-20 access opportunities to learn, with strands in the K-16 STEM pipeline, principal preparation, education policy implementation, STEM education and leadership, school improvement, and the roles of motivational beliefs, mentoring, and supports in shaping STEM career pathways. She leads the Becoming Lab, an affiliate of the Measurement, Quantitative Methods, and Learning Sciences program. Rangel holds a Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Planning from The University of Texas at Austin (2012), an M.A. in Government from the same institution (2007), and a B.A. in International Studies from Middlebury College (2002, magna cum laude). Her appointments include assistant professor at the University of Houston (2015-2022), faculty affiliate at the Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership (2021-present), and associate director of research at Rice University's Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship (2012-2014).

Rangel has earned the University of Houston College of Education Collaborative Research Award (2022), Teaching Excellence Award (2021), and Research Excellence Award (2020), along with AERA Division H awards for program evaluation (2014) and planning/policy/management research (2011). As principal investigator or co-principal investigator, she has secured grants exceeding $2 million from the National Science Foundation (e.g., DRK-12 $374,000, 2014; ITEST $739,486, 2022), Spencer Foundation ($49,767, 2017), and university funds. Select publications include "A review of the research on principal turnover" (Review of Educational Research, 2018), "Teachers’ sensemaking and data use implementation in science classrooms" (Education and Urban Society, 2019), "A typology of high school students’ science and math motivational beliefs" (Science Education, 2020), "Student engagement in an online STEM afterschool program during COVID" (Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research, 2022), and "Variability in mentoring relationships in an afterschool STEM mentoring program" (International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 2022). Her scholarship, cited over 2,077 times on Google Scholar, impacts STEM equity, leadership preparation, and policy. She serves on the University of Houston Faculty Senate Research Committee.