LSRI Speaker Series - Audio
Learning Sciences Research Institute
Learning Sciences Research Institute Speaker Series (Audio) : This podcast delivers the audio from our speaker series. On occasion, the Center has guest speakers come and discuss their latest research and activities to a diverse audience here at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Mary Beth Rosson, Professor, Stanford University
Over the past 25 years, user interface designers and usability engineers have studied and refined human-computer interaction techniques with the goal of improving people’s productivity and experience. But the target of these efforts — the end user — is fast becoming a thing of the past. Many people now construct or extend software on their own, building artifacts that range from email filters to spreadsheet simulations to interactive web applications. These individuals are end user developers wh
Nov 16, 2007 • 0:00
Daniel Schwartz, Professor, Stanford University
Over the past years, we have been developing a computer learning technology called a Teachable Agent. The work leverages the common wisdom that people "really" learn when they have to teach. After a few years of positive results, we decided to get a better look at the mechanisms that drive learning in social interaction. Most cognitively inspired theories of learning point to the useful questions and ideas that arise in social interaction. But, can we really reduce the learning benefits of socia
Oct 26, 2007 • 0:01
Nathalie Sinclair, Professor, Simon Fraser University
I seek to establish insight into varieties of modeling that occur, recurrently, in students', teachers', and curriculum developers' experiences with The Geometer's Sketchpad. In this process, I attempt to contrast the conventional, practical sense of mathematical modeling-modeling of situations and phenomena to generate and predict plausible outcomes-to at least two other available forms or types of modeling practice, that I find especially relevant to mathematics education in their foundational
Oct 19, 2007 • 0:01
Nicholas Jackiw, Chief Technology Officer, KCP Technologies
In considering the geometric figure, Kant distinguishes between image--the traditional visual diagram--and schemata, the generalized concept of that diagram that "can never exist anywhere except in thought." Dynamic Geometry figures produced by software such as The Geometer's Sketchpad bridge this divide through flexible, "rubbery" diagrams that (under manipulation) transform into any valid realization of their defining geometric constraints, but at any instant retain the immediacy and tangibili
Oct 18, 2007 • 0:01
Melanie Cooper, Professor, Clemson University
Problem solving is one of the most important goals of any science course. However it is notoriously difficult to improve students’ problem solving abilities, and many students never develop competence. This is particularly true for open-ended or case-based problems – which are also more difficult to assess. We use a number of methods including a suite of software tools and inventories that allow us to assess both student problem solving strategy, student ability, and metacognitive activity as th
Oct 9, 2007 • 0:01
Chris Quintana, University of Michigan
Design is an inherently interdisciplinary enterprise and the design of learning technologies is no exception. Learning technology designers must consider issues from a range of disciplines, such as software design and human-computer interaction (HCI), learning sciences, and related content domains. But while designers and researchers can draw from existing work in these different disciplines, there are still many questions to explore about the design, use, and impact of learning technologies. Fr
Feb 7, 2007 • 0:01
Ryan S.J.d. Baker, Learning Sciences Research Institute, University of Nottingham
Detecting and Adapting to When Students Game the System: Students use intelligent tutors and other types of interactive learning environments in a considerable variety of ways. In this talk, Dr. Ryan Baker will present research on automatically detecting and adapting to when students "game the system", attempting to succeed in a learning environment by exploiting properties of the system rather than by learning the material and trying to use that knowledge to answer correctly. Dr. Baker will pr
Jan 23, 2007 • 0:00
Brian Smith, The Pennsylvania State University
Acts into Artifacts: Computational Tools to Support Experience Capture and Reflection: Dr. Smith’s research deals with the design and evaluation of systems that capture aspects of everyday experiences for reflection and learning. Dr. Smith will discuss a current project that examines ways to have fantasy sports players reflect on their decision making and enhance their reasoning with statistical analyses. Time permitting, he will discuss other lab projects that look more broadly at the ways tha
Jan 16, 2007 • 0:01
Alison Castro, University of Michigan
Learning how to use mathematics curriculum materials effectively is arguably an important part of the work of teaching. Through my work on the BIFOCAL Project, a multi-year professional development project aimed at supporting middle school math teachers' use of curriculum materials, I began to think about the precise role that these materials play in the work of teaching, which led to my dissertation study. Briefly, the focus of my dissertation is an examination of how experienced middle school
Apr 4, 2006 • 0:01
Nicole Pinkard, University of Chicago
Closing the Participation Gap: Creating a Technical and Learning Infrastructure to Support the Analysis of the Impact of Ubiquitous Computing on Urban Youth
Mar 22, 2006 • 0:01
Flavio Azevedo, University of California Santa Cruz
Educators seeking to motivate students often do so by inquiring into students’ interests and designing instruction anchored in such interests. This approach is based on psychological theories of individual (long-term) interests, which propose that a person’s extended, self-motivated pursuit of topically related activities flow directly and simply from her relationship to the topic or domain. As an example, a child’s continued engagement with a set of dinosaur-related activities is said to stem f
Mar 6, 2006 • 0:01
Andrew Brantlinger, Northwestern University
Standards-based reforms in mathematics education place issues of equity front and center. Indeed, curriculum and instruction that is aligned with national standards appear to lead to more equitable outcomes for students (NCTM, 2000; Schoenfeld, 2002). However, many scholars argue that the reform movement does not go far enough in terms of equity (Apple, 1992; Gutierrez, 2002; Gutstein, 2003). These scholars argue for the importance of "critical mathematics," that is, the infusion of political th
Mar 2, 2006 • 0:01
Mike Stieff, University of California - Davis
Recent advancements in educational technologies have led to an explosion of visualization software for teaching and learning science, particularly chemistry. To varying degrees, visualization tools help teachers and students perceive the imperceptible objects and phenomena of the chemical world. Although some visualization tools have seen great success in the classroom, others have had little impact on student learning and understanding. The present talk explores a novel cognitive model that bot
Feb 28, 2006 • 0:01
Eva Thanheiser, San Diego State University
Although preservice elementary school teachers (PSTs) have been shown to lack the understanding of multidigit whole numbers necessary to teach in ways that empower students mathematically, little is known about their conceptions. I draw upon the extensive research on children's understanding of multidigit whole numbers to explicate PSTs' conceptions of these numbers. I develop a framework for PSTs' conceptions of multidigit whole numbers and use that framework to describe their conceptions and t
Feb 23, 2006 • 0:01
Josh Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago
The term data visualization is often used to describe computer software or its products. I argue that learning sciences research can benefit from conceptualizing data visualization instead as a mode of shared sense-making, in which the co-construction of meaning is mediated by visual data artifacts. This process can be studied at sociocultural and microgenetic levels of analysis, for purposes of better understanding the multiple literacies and trajectories of learning in which visual data are em
Feb 22, 2006 • 0:01
Marcelle Siegel, UC San Francisco
Decisions, Decisions: Assessing Students' and Preservice Teachers' Use of Scientific Evidence
Feb 21, 2006 • 0:01
Joe Krajcik, University of Michigan
Scaffolding Students in Writing Evidence-Based Scientific Explanations: Developing evidence-based explanations is a critical aspect of science. Recent science reform documents and efforts advocate that students develop scientific inquiry practices, such as the construction and communication of scientific explanations.
Jan 27, 2006 • 1:30:00
Danny Martin
Race, Identity, and Mathematics Literacy: African American Counternarratives
Jan 12, 2006 • 1:30:00
Yvonne Rogers
Geologists, biologists, climatologists, seismologists and other scientists nowadays use a diversity of sensing devices and measuring instruments to record aspects of the earth, in order to investigate, predict and reason about a particular aspect of the environment. A major part of their research involves mapping, matching and noticing patterns and anomalies from the masses of datasets that they collect over time. However, it is very difficult to become competent at accomplishing these forms of
Oct 16, 2005 • 1:30:00
Richard Halverson
Abstract Recent policy demands for external accountability are challenging instructional leaders to rethink how they have traditionally guided the practices of teaching and learning in schools. I will discuss how a new conception of instructional leadership is emerging across the country that focuses on how local leaders and teachers build data-driven instructional systems (DDIS) in their schools. I will argue that a learning sciences perspective, grounded in distributed cognition and the situat
Sep 16, 2005 • 1:30:00
Erica Halverson
Telling, adapting, and performing stories: How literacy meets identity
Sep 15, 2005 • 1:30:00
Deanna Kuhn, Columbia University
Kendler and Kendler (1962) are remembered for their bold challenge to the behaviorist tenet, widely accepted in the middle of the 20th century, that the learning process functions in an identical manner across species and across the human life cycle. To the contrary, they argued, learning develops. Young children learn via associationist mechanisms, but by age 7, the learning process has been transformed into one involving internal mediating concepts that connect overt stimuli and responses. To
Apr 1, 2005 • 1:30:00
Richard Anderson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
American children usually find a free-flowing, open format approach to classroom discussion called Collaborative Reasoning to be intellectually stimulating and personally engaging. In this talk, I will present initial evidence about the response of the children from two sites in China and one site in Korea to Collaborative Reasoning discussions. The expected discourse of these discussions is a radical departure from the prevailing patterns of discourse in Asian homes and schools. Thus, according
Feb 18, 2005 • 1:30:00
Hilda Borko, University of Colorado - Boulder
Dr. Hilda Borko’s presentation focuses on the teacher professional development component of the STAAR project. STAAR – Supporting the Transition from Arithmetic to Algebraic Thinking – is a multi-year, multi-site research program funded through an IERI grant. The research team at the University of Colorado at Boulder is developing and studying a professional development program intended to help teachers foster algebraic thinking in their classrooms.
Nov 12, 2004 • 1:30:00
Janet Kolodner, Georgia Institute of Technology
Ten years ago, I realized that case-based reasoning, an approach to designing computer programs that could reason based on their experiences, suggested ways of promoting productive learning in people. Based on that insight and on CBR's implied cognitive model, my research group and I have designed a project-based inquiry approach to middle school science called Learning by Design. LBD takes into account the cognitive model proposed by CBR as well as the constraints and opportunities afforded by
Oct 12, 2004 • 1:30:00
Janet Kolodner, Georgia Institute of Technology
By facilitating the growth of a culture of collaboration and rigorous scientific thinking in middle school science classrooms, we've been able to promote significant learning of and engagement in scientific reasoning. I present some of what we've learned about how to promote a classroom culture and the learning that ensues from it.
Oct 11, 2004 • 1:30:00