I am Assistant Professor of Psychology and the Learning Sciences in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with a collaborative appointment in Computer Science. I am director of WPI's Educational Psychology Laboratory. I will be on leave from WPI as of September, 2012.
As of September, 2012, I will be the Julius and Rosa Sachs Distinguished Lecturer at Teachers College Columbia University. Within TC, I will be Visiting Associate Professor of Human Development, with a partial appointment in Mathematics, Science, and Technology.
I am President of the
International Educational Data Mining Society. I am also Associate Editor of the Journal of Educational Data Mining. Issue 2 (1) is now available.
I am also a member of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center.
My research is at the intersection of Educational Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction. I 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. I study these issues within intelligent tutors and educational games.
In recent years, my colleagues and I 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.
I have made some tools for EDM research available here.
Selected Current and Upcoming Projects
- Predicting STEM Career Choice from Computational Indicators of
Student Engagement within Middle School Mathematics Classes (funded by NSF ITEST)
- Classroom Environment, Allocation of Attention, and Learning Outcomes
in K-4 Students (funded by IES)
- Understanding Disengaged Behaviors as Mediators Between Individual Differences and Learning Outcomes (funded by NSF REESE)
- Development of an Educational Data Mining Workbench (funded by ERDT Philippines)
- Understanding the Differences Between Rational and
Machine-Learned Models of Gaming the System (funded by NSF-SLC PSLC)
- Preventing and Adapting to Gaming the System (funded by NSF-SLC PSLC)
- Integrating Conceptual Learning and Problem-Solving in Genetics (funded by IES)
- Studying the Robustness of Student Learning in Genetics (funded by NSF REESE)
- Detectors of Affect in Educational Software (funded by NSF-SLC PSLC)
- Student Behavior in Educational Software Across Cultures
- Educational Games for Learning Fractions (funded by NSF-SLC PSLC)
Please check out my publications web page for recent papers.
