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My research interests center on understanding how educational programs, policies, and research-practice partnerships can better support the learning experiences and outcomes of historically underserved students. My prior research has primarily used qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to examine how students, families, educators, and community partners experience and shape educational systems, with a particular focus on Latine and multilingual communities. My current work extends these interests to mathematics education through the Scalability, Capacity, and Learning Engagement for Fraction Face-Off (SCALE; PI: Dr. Leanne Ketterlin Geller) project, focused on supporting the implementation and scaling of a mathematic intervention. I am particularly interested in how research-practice partnerships can bridge research and practice in ways that are responsive to the contexts of schools and educators, as well as in understanding how multilingual learners experience and benefit from mathematics interventions.

Representative publications

Zehrung, R., Cawelti, L., Van Steenis, E., Ponce Soria, V., Mendoza, G. A., Arum, R., Chen, Y., & Ahn, J. (2025). “How did we miss it?”: Examining the infrastructural work of practitioners supporting housing insecure and foster youth students. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(7), Article CSCW268.

Villavicencio, A., Ponce Soria, V., & Wu, T. (2025). Counter-narratives from Spanish and Chinese-speaking parents navigating school choice in the United States. Race Ethnicity and Education, 1–23. Advance online publication.

Ponce Soria, V. (2024). Parents, students, and education leaders: Investigating the learning experiences of Latine students in the U.S. South (Doctoral dissertation). University of California, Irvine.

Wu, T., Villavicencio, A., & Ponce Soria, V. (2024). Racial attitudes among Asian American parents and their influence on school choice. Harvard Educational Review, 94(4), 491–514.

Supplementary

I have worked as a Research Assistant, Researcher, and Research Manager on research and evaluation projects in university and nonprofit settings. My experience includes conducting interviews, focus groups, observations, and surveys; coordinating multi-site data collection; analyzing qualitative and quantitative data; and disseminating products for both research and practitioner audiences. Projects I have worked on have been funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department. I was a 2021 UCI Orange County Educational Advancement Network Community Research Fellow and recipient of the 2019 North Carolina Latino Diamante Award in Education.