NaYoung Hwang

NaYoung Hwang holds a PhD in Education from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include inequality in education and educational policy. NaYoung has worked on school discipline, growth mindset, curriculum policy, and youth employment. NaYoung's work has been published in Educational Researcher, American Education Research Journal, Youth & Society, and Journal of Research on Adolescence.

As an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in her native Korea, NaYoung was able to witness firsthand the influence of socioeconomic background on a child’s English language achievement and, ultimately, educational prospects. In addition, by teaching English to adult professionals, she observed the crucial influence of one’s childhood access to language education on his/her future employment opportunities in English-obsessed Korea. These experiences, combined with her work as a volunteer teacher in Korean orphanages, spurred NaYoung’s interest in the impact of education on social mobility and stratification.

NaYoung is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame, where she explores policies and methods that can improve the abilities and prospects of children from underprivileged backgrounds. Her current project centers on teacher-student demographic matching and the degree to which it may impact students’ academic achievement and behavioral outcomes.