About

Julie Jackson Cohen is an Associate Professor at the UVA School of Education and Human Development. Her research focuses on the conceptualization and measurement of teaching quality, the influence of accountability and teacher evaluation systems on teaching practice, and the development of effective instructional practices in pre-service teacher education and professional development. She is engaged in projects that utilize mixed reality simulations as practice spaces and assessment platforms for pre-service teachers, and she leads initiatives in partnership with Student Achievement Partners to operationalize, measure, and support Common Core aligned teaching practices. Cohen’s work has been funded by notable organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Overdeck Family Foundation. Her recent publications have appeared in prominent journals such as Educational Researcher, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the Journal of Teacher Education.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Medicine
• Linguistics
• Pedagogy
• Medical education
• Applied psychology

Selected publications

• Exploring the Use of Performance Tasks as Formative Assessments of Pre-Service Teacher Instructional Skills within Teacher Preparation Programs

  Educational Assessment · 2026-05-07

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Practice-Based, Online Modules for Expediting Teacher Skill Development

  Brown Digital Repository · 2026-04-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Missing Middle? General and Special Educators’ Views of Effective Mathematics Instruction

  AERA Open · 2025-06-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  General educators rarely receive adequate training for supporting students with disabilities (SWDs). We suggest a key contributing factor is the longstanding gap between special and general education researchers, which is especially pronounced in mathematics. Researchers from these fields work in isolation from one another, the result of what sociologists term “epistemic bunkers.” These cross-field divisions have pragmatic consequences. Well-established teaching strategies known to support SWDs are untouched in general teacher education. At the same time, prospective special educators lack exposure to many key instructional principles from mathematics education. In this interview study, 22 general and special education researchers describe their goals for mathematics education. Our data suggest considerable within-group heterogeneity, but also clear within-group themes and between-group distinctions. There were numerous points of intersection between special and general educators’ perspectives on mathematics teaching and learning, providing clear opportunities for bridge building. We conclude with implications for research and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Approximating Teaching: A Systematic Review of the Research

  Review of Educational Research · 2025-10-09 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Teacher candidates (“candidates”) need opportunities for practice during teacher preparation so they can enact equitable, responsive instruction as soon as they enter classrooms. Theory suggests candidates can benefit from “approximating” aspects of teaching in reduced-complexity settings like role-plays, rehearsals, and simulations, where they can receive more support than they might in clinical placements, without risking harm to real students. However, the field needs more clarity about how to leverage approximations in effective and efficient ways that promote candidate learning. To determine which supports contribute to candidate learning from approximations, we systematically reviewed 26 studies that include measures of learning following approximations. We examine the contexts and conditions in which approximations are helpful, with which supports, and toward which goals. Although 23 studies find candidates improve after approximations, there are numerous methodological issues with the research base that limit the claims we can make about the affordances and constraints of different approaches to approximation. Absent empirical clarity, we offer a range of hypotheses we argue can and should be tested systematically through coordinated research efforts. We conclude by suggesting common definitions and variables for future, more systematic research of approximations of teaching.

  PublisherDOI

• Practice does not make perfect: Experimental evidence on the effectiveness of coaching beginning teachers.

  Journal of Educational Psychology · 2025-07-10 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tailoring Teacher Supports: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Responses to Coaching and Self-Reflection

  AERA Open · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  To ensure that new teachers enter classrooms poised for success, we need more evidence regarding supports that can expedite skill development during teacher education. In this study, we capitalize on mixed-reality simulations as a setting for evaluating such supports. Using a randomized control trial, we examine the extent to which coaching improves text-focused instruction compared to the more typical practice of self-reflection. Then, employing a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, we qualitatively and quantitatively explore the extent to which candidates’ individual characteristics might influence the effectiveness of those supports. We find that, on average, coaching is the more effective support for skill development, but we also surface potential drivers of heterogeneous effects of both coaching and self-reflection, including self-efficacy, extraversion, and prior skills. We conclude with implications for teacher education programs and researchers.

  PublisherDOI

• The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Language Models to Measure Instruction Quality in Education

  2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Paiheng Xu, Jing Liu, Nathan Jones, Julie Cohen, Wei Ai. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Language Models to Measure Instruction Quality in Education

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-04-03

  preprintOpen access

  Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and frequent feedback. Different from prior research that mostly focuses on low-inference instructional practices on a singular basis, this paper presents the first study that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to assess multiple high-inference instructional practices in two distinct educational settings: in-person K-12 classrooms and simulated performance tasks for pre-service teachers. This is also the first study that applies NLP to measure a teaching practice that is widely acknowledged to be particularly effective for students with special needs. We confront two challenges inherent in NLP-based instructional analysis, including noisy and long input data and highly skewed distributions of human ratings. Our results suggest that pretrained Language Models (PLMs) demonstrate performances comparable to the agreement level of human raters for variables that are more discrete and require lower inference, but their efficacy diminishes with more complex teaching practices. Interestingly, using only teachers' utterances as input yields strong results for student-centered variables, alleviating common concerns over the difficulty of collecting and transcribing high-quality student speech data in in-person teaching settings. Our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of current NLP techniques in the education domain, opening avenues for further exploration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Flipping the Script”

  California History · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the work of Alma Whitaker—feminist, reporter, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times from 1910 to 1944. Widely known in her time but almost totally forgotten today, Whitaker’s work illustrates the formative role of newspaperwomen in the expansion of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, and specifically in promoting a settler fantasy that redefined notions of white women’s selfhood in the frontier space of Los Angeles. Her popular articles and columns both bolstered the white settler campaign to create Los Angeles as a white settlement and challenged patriarchal norms. Situating Whitaker within the emergence of the mass-circulating urban newspaper industry and the colonization of Los Angeles, this article contributes to the fields of women/gender history, hegemonic feminism, borderlands/California, and recent scholarship on settler colonialism as a framework for understanding U.S. history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Experimental Evidence on the Robustness of Coaching Supports in Teacher Education

  Educational Researcher · 2023-12-18 · 22 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Many novice teachers learn to teach “on the job,” leading to burnout and attrition among teachers and negative outcomes for students in the long term. Preservice teacher education is tasked with optimizing teacher readiness, but there is a lack of causal evidence regarding effective ways to prepare new teachers. In this paper, we use a mixed-reality simulation platform to evaluate the causal effects and robustness of an individualized, brief, and highly directive coaching model for candidates enrolled in a university-based teacher education program as well as for undergraduates considering teaching as a profession. Across five conceptual replication studies, we find that short, targeted, and directive coaching significantly improves candidates’ instructional performance during simulated classroom sessions and that coaching effects are robust across different teaching tasks, study timing, and modes of delivery. However, coaching effects are smaller for a subpopulation of participants not formally enrolled in a teacher preparation program. These participants differed in terms of prior experiences learning about instructional methods, suggesting that coaching in isolation is not as effective without corresponding coursework on targeted practices. Taken together, our five studies provide encouraging evidence that teacher preparation can be an important time for rapid skill development when candidates are given targeted practice opportunities and corresponding support. Although we often think that practice has to happen in real classrooms with real students, we provide robust evidence that “the work of teaching” can be incorporated into teacher education coursework. We highlight implications for research and practice.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pam Grossman

  University of Pennsylvania

  8 shared

• Rebekah Berlin

  Impact

  8 shared

• Cindy Oser

  6 shared

• Emily Wiseman

  Florida Institute of Technology

  5 shared

• Enrico Casadio Tarabusi

  Sapienza University of Rome

  4 shared

• Erica Lurie-Hurvitz

  4 shared

• Jing Liu

  4 shared

• Diane Paulsell

  Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Virginia Education Science Training (VEST) Fellowships