The Educational Psychology Laboratory at WPI, directed by Professor Ryan Baker conducts research at the intersection of Educational Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction. We develop and use methods for mining the data that comes out of the interactions between students and educational software, in order to better understand how students respond to educational software, and how these responses impact their learning. We study these issues within intelligent tutors and educational games.

In recent years, we have developed automated detectors that make inferences in real-time about students' motivational and meta-cognitive behavior, using data from students' actions within educational software (no sensor, video, or audio data). We have in particular studied "gaming the system", off-task behavior, guessing, and slipping. We use these models to make basic discoveries about human learning and learners, and their cognition, meta-cognition, motivation, and affect.

To learn more about our projects, go to our projects page.

To join us, go to our opportunities page.