Current Projects

Current Projects

At ILT, we take a grounded and embodied cognition approach to mental models. This approach says that students reason about systems by being able to visualize and mentally animate entities that interact and affect each other. We see these mental models as representing a deeper level of understanding than we usually get from students. We are currently conducting a series of research projects that examine the learning, understanding, and motivational effectiveness of various ways of providing this grounding/embodiment, using different combinations of technologies.


Feedback Interactivity in Formative Assessments

The study aims to investigate the effects of feedback interactivity on student learning and performance on online formative assessments. Participants are given a short mini-lesson explaining how to find the area and the perimeter of fractal shapes. They are then given a short practice quiz, with conditions varying in the type of feedback the participants receive after each question. Feedback would range in interactivity with differences in the level of input/response prompted to the participant. The study aims to explore how this level of interactivity would affect their performance on a following assessment, and also examine the reception participants had towards their feedback in terms of satisfaction, difficulty, and preferences.

Researcher: Ishaq Chowdhury


Computational Thinking and STEM in Public Elementary Schools

BeeBot slideshowThe ILT STEM after-school program at TCCS focuses on promoting critical thinking skills for STEM-related domains using plugged and unplugged activities for grades K-5. Starting in Fall 2014, the group examined activities designed to improve computational thinking and math knowledge. In 2015-2016, programming applications (Scratch Jr., Hopscotch), and Lego WeDo were used to help students learn to code and to develop computational thinking skills. For 2016-2017, we will teach robotics and computational thinking concepts to 2nd and 3rd graders.

Principal Investigator: John Black

Researchers: Woonhee Sung, Jung-Hyun Ahn, Yaoli Mao


Motivation: Struggling Scientists

Many students lack the motivation to pursue STEM oriented courses or careers. Their beliefs about the relations between effort and learning outcomes become barriers to their STEM learning. Thus, when students struggle in STEM classes, they perceive this as a sign that they are not smart enough to be good in STEM and will never succeed at it. We tackle these beliefs and attitudes by exposing high school students to scientists’ struggling stories, reminding students that even the greatest scientists experience struggle and difficulty. Our ongoing work investigates how different types of scientists’ struggling stories affect students’ beliefs about their own STEM learning ability and students’ actual STEM performance.

Principal Investigator: Xiaodong Lin

Postdoctoral Project Manager: Kristen Elmore

Researchers: Marianna Lamnina, Danfei Hu, Fu-Fen Fang, Shuzi Meng, Zhong Qi Shi, Yaena Song, John Park, Kendra Whitfield, Hyojin Kim, Myra Luna-Lucero


To Understand is to Forgive

The project goal is to investigate whether developing a more robust, complete, accurate, and grounded (i.e. taught by means of concrete illustrations of human behavior) mental model of the human emotion system leads to enhancements in social emotional skills in middle-school-aged children.

Researchers: Ilya Lyashevsky, Melissa Cesarano


Failing for Future Learning

Failure is often discussed as a critical part of the pathway to success, but little is actually known about what must happen in the moment of failure to make it productive. Furthermore, failure might afford opportunities to glean information about one’s own performance, about the task at hand, and about the underlying system that governs the problem, but to take advantage of these opportunities require additional effort and skill. Games provide a safe space for failure that permits for a variety of actions and strategies to be taken in response to failure, that could lead to later success. This study draws from various theories of learning, metacognition, motivation, and games research to put forth a theoretical framework for asking: what kinds of responses to failure are most effective for later learning?

Researchers: Alison Lee


GeoGames

GeoGames is a set of digital activities for elementary school students that are based on research into children’s conceptions of the world and are designed to help with geography concepts and mapping skills. In playing GeoGames, students build a globe, layer by layer, in an online environment. They first build Planet Earth, adding the North and South poles, continents, mountains and rivers. They can then add political entities’ ountries and their major cities. And finally, they can map journeys. These components can be used separately or together, and in any order, depending on the teacher’s goals and the students’ needs. The built globe also appears, and can be printed, as a flat map, helping students understand map projections. GeoGames is being developed in collaboration with Reach the World, a not-for-profit foundation that offers professional development to teachers in New York City public schools. Funded by a grant from the National Geographic Education Fund Project.

Director: Susan Lowes