Amy Ogan, an assistant professor in the HCII and an educational technologist, is fascinated by researching ways to make learning more engaging, effective and enjoyable. Ogan is also a recent recipient of the Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship, a global fellowship program for the research on child and youth development.
Our Connection Machines project investigates nonverbal and verbal behaviors of two partners in a conversation setting in the context of rapport. We have collected data on teenagers conducting a peer tutoring task in linear algebra. We are currently investigating nonverbal behaviors, such as smile, gaze, prosody and pitch, and verbal content, such as second person pronoun use, of the participants in the dialogue.
The AdaptErrEx project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, has developed materials to support learning of decimals through erroneous examples. The main goals are to support deeper, more robust learning and to improve error-detection skills. All the materials developed on the AdaptErrEx project will eventually be freely available through MathTutor, a website that helps middle school students learn math.
In this project, we aim to address the systematically-reduced standardized test scores of African American students compared to their Euro-American peers by using virtual peer technology to understand the role of dialect, and more broadly, cultural congruence, on students's performance, and to help students achieve in the classroom.
Working and living internationally can be a rewarding but difficult experience. This project investigates how people gain intercultural competence while developing technology to support the learning experience. We are currently developing a system to help new international teaching assistants allow for increased and equitable discussion in the recitation sections they lead. For many ITAs, discussion has not been a part of their previous school experience.
If Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are the democratizing educational innovation that many claim them to be, then why do the largest proportion of MOOC learners hold a college degree or higher and live in the world’s most developed countries?
The LASAD project is focused on helping students learn to argue, debate and think critically by working collaboratively on a webpage that allows creation and extension of a graphical argument.
This research aims to improve student learning effectiveness, efficiency, and enjoyment in online courses (aka MOOCs) by using online learning data to provide constructive feedback to course developers and instructors. The feedback provides assistance with the design and improvement of course activities and effective instruction. Online course development is often guided primarily by the intuition of the instructor.
When it comes to learning math, how much fun you are having is rarely factored into the equation. That isn't to say that game designers have not tried to turn instruction into more engaging material. For instance, there are plenty of educational games on the shelves; unfortunately, very few of them have been shown, through empirical research, to lead to improved learning outcomes, particularly in mathematics.
Based on our experiences with designing and engineering multi-party conversational environments such as collaborative learning systems that involve integrating the state of the art in text classification and conversational agent technology, we are developing a framework that facilitates such integration
