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 welcome (and can advise) students in Learning Sciences and Technology (program approval pending), Psychological Science, Computer Science, and in interdisciplinary projects (IQP, MQP) and for interdisciplinary graduate study at WPI.
My research group is currently recruiting for Research Assistants, Research Associates, Interns, Programmers, Undergraduates, Masters students, PhD students, and Post-Doctoral Fellows.
I am Conference Chair for the Third International Conference on Educational Data Mining -- join us in Pittsburgh on June 11-13, 2009!
I am also Associate Editor of the Journal of Educational Data Mining. Issue 1 (1) is now available.
Previously, I was at the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, at
Carnegie Mellon University. While there, I was Technical Director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center DataShop, the world's leading repository for data on the interaction between students and educational software. I am now Scientific Advisor to the PSLC DataShop.
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.
Selected Current and Upcoming Projects
- 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)
- Cross-Domain and Learning Software Detectors of Affect (funded by NSF-SLC PSLC)
- Student Behavior in Educational Software Across Cultures
- Educational Games for Learning Fractions (funded by NSF-SLC PSLC)
- Geometry Greatest Hits (funded by NSF-SLC PSLC)
- Modeling Guessing and Slipping in Learning (funded by NSF IERI)
- Differences in Learner Behavior Across School Settings (funded by NSF IERI)
Please check out my publications web page for recent papers.
