Taylor Fox
Why do students in the same course, taught the same way, produce inconsistent outcomes?
My scholarly work is grounded in one sustained question: what does it take for learners at any stage of life to develop the higher-order thinking skills that education, career, and civic participation demand?
Research identity and foundation
That question first took shape during my B.A. in History, where primary source analysis and disciplinary argumentation showed me how differently people engage with evidence when instruction does not explicitly develop that capacity. My research interests have never been bounded by grade level. The same questions that apply to a tenth-grade AP student apply, in different forms, to a college freshman, an adult learner re-entering the workforce, and a graduate student navigating disciplinary writing for the first time.
My M.Ed. thesis, Sheltered Instruction: Equipping Teachers for Language and Core Education (2016), investigated how to combine core content instruction with language acquisition to better serve English Language Learners. That research was grounded in a conviction that still drives all of my work: access to quality education is the most powerful equalizer a society can offer, and the learners most in need of rigorous preparation are consistently the least likely to receive it.
Current research
My dissertation, Recommendations for Solving the Problem of Inconsistent AP World History Exam Pass Rates, investigates a measurable problem at the intersection of secondary and postsecondary education: why students in the same course, taught by the same instructor, with access to the same resources, produce inconsistent exam outcomes across academic years.
The study uses a mixed-methods design: semi-structured alumni interviews, a Likert-scale survey on instructional preparedness, and a systematic document analysis benchmarked against the College Board's AP World History Course and Exam Description. The central concern is the transition from content recall to disciplinary analytical reasoning, a challenge that does not resolve at the end of high school but persists into undergraduate coursework and beyond.
Human judgment gets more valuable, not less.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the cognitive landscape across K-12 classrooms, college campuses, and adult learning environments simultaneously, and it is moving faster than schools can adapt. The foundations of how education uses these tools are being set right now, and I intend to help set them. My future research agenda is organized around three intersecting questions.
Does AI adoption accelerate or erode reasoning?
How is AI adoption affecting the development of analytical reasoning across educational levels, and does it accelerate or erode the higher-order thinking that rigorous coursework and professional environments demand?
What makes instruction AI-resilient?
What instructional frameworks are most effective at developing critical thinking that is both AI-augmented and AI-resilient, from secondary through postsecondary and into workforce training?
What are the equity implications?
What are the equity implications of differential AI access across school types, income levels, and demographic groups, and how do those disparities compound existing gaps in college and career readiness?
"My thesis about AI and curriculum is specific: human judgment about what matters goes up in value, not down, when AI is in the production loop, because the thing that degrades fastest is the ability to distinguish content that looks like teaching from content that actually teaches. Encoding that distinction into systems that scale it is curriculum work."
Published and forthcoming work
Recommendations for Solving the Problem of Inconsistent AP World History Exam Pass Rates
Doctoral dissertation, Liberty University. Expected 2026.
Sheltered Instruction: Equipping Teachers for Language and Core Education
M.Ed. thesis, Concordia University Portland, 2016. Argues for sheltered instruction as an adult learning design solution that equips teachers to serve English Language Learners within core content classrooms.