Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8352

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4018

Joyce Alexander

“The first time I heard a child talk about dinosaurs, I knew that informal science was his passion. Since then, understanding informal science has become my passion.”

My initial work reported outcomes of experimental and cross-sectional research aimed at examining the role of knowledge and intelligence in strategy use. Since 1999, and with the support of funding from National Science Foundation, Kathy Johnson and I have been tracking the interests, amount of knowledge, strategies (and changes in strategies) and home support available for children with high levels of knowledge. My research team has recently been focused on identifying the consequences of learning knowledge through play vs. learning knowledge through a structured school curriculum.

I believe that hobbies provide an important window into developmental theory, and that an explicit focus on school content limits the potential for theory development. Understanding how children see the world in content areas that are important to them is incredibly exciting research to be engaging. I find that working in out-of-school settings, such as the world’s largest children’s museum in Indianapolis, creates wonderful opportunities for me and my research team. Bloomington and Indianapolis have a large number of these spaces, providing powerful incubation environments for developing theory.

Research Articles

• Factors associated with the early emergence of intense interests within conceptual domains
• The development of conceptual interests in young children
• Children’s Early Interest-Based Activities in the Home and Subsequent Information Contributions and Pursuits in Kindergarten
• Stegosaurus and Spoonbills: Mechanisms for transfer across biological domains

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8462

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4066

Sasha Barab, Barbara Jacobs Chair of Education and Technology

"Learning sciences brings together theory, practice, and design, allowing us to both change the world and better understand the implications of doing so. What is gained and what is lost, and what does it all tell us about human nature and the world in which we all share."

I am working on several research projects related to games and learning, and understanding the role of what we call ‘transactive’ art to support deep understanding of content. Schools often simply present content as facts to be memorized rather than as tools to solve problems. It is one thing to learn about erosion or algae blooms as dictionary definitions to be memorized for a test. It is another to learn them as tools to make sense of an evolving storyline related to a water quality problem and to understand and explain why fish might be dying in a park. We explore — with the power of gaming — contexts to establish such situations.

I enjoy working with students because they challenge my thinking and bring energy and unique perspectives to my work. It is very easy to develop blinders and fail to see the shortcomings of your own work or the relevance of the work of others. Students bring diverse perspectives to the conversation; taking courses and reading related papers, they constantly bringing the ideas to advance and improve the collaborative work. They bring their diverse passions and experiences, changing priorities and enabling projects to become more than they would otherwise be. Finally, there is the joy of watching people become more theoretically sophisticated.

• Situationally Embodied Curriculum: Relating Formalisms and Contexts
• Curriculum-Based Ecosystems: Supporting Knowing From an Ecological Perspective 
• Our Designs and the Social Agendas They Carry
• Smart People or Smart Contexts

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8231

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4020

Nathaniel Brown

“Learning Sciences is the future of research and scholarship in how people think and learn. In bringing together ideas and methods from fields as diverse as educational psychology, cultural and cognitive anthropology, cognitive science, and critical theory, Learning Sciences is uniquely positioned to tackle the thorny but real-world problems of understanding and designing learning in context.”

My research focuses on conceptual understanding and explanation in science education. I’m particularly interested in how cognitive activity and learning are both constrained and enhanced by our sensory systems (e.g., aural, visual, kinesthetic), a theoretical position known as embodied cognition. My methods combine the detailed study of situated cognitive activity, exemplified by interaction analysis of video records, and the objective characterization of such interactions, exemplified by construct-referenced (Rasch) measurement. My research also focuses on upgrading classroom assessment to true classroom measurement, most recently in the areas of middle and high school content-area literacy and science.

Because my research brings together qualitative and quantitative methods in a novel and integrated way, I am able to validly characterize and measure cognitive activity and learning in complex settings. This type of research requires collaboration among faculty with different backgrounds. The IU Learning Sciences program has taken special care to develop and preserve a rich variety of complementary expertise in its faculty — representing the multiple perspectives upon which the learning sciences draw. The result is a faculty that is more diverse than many traditional programs, yet shares a focus that leads to much more interaction and collaboration than in a typical program.

Research Articles

• The Multidimensional Measure of Conceptual Complexity
• Assessing Literacy in the Classroom: The BEAR Assessment System
• Performance Analysis: Characterizing Knowing in a Clinical Interview 
• Constituting "Missing Objects" in Learning Conversations

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8330

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4040

Joshua Danish

“The learning sciences are about the synthesis of ideas. Theories addressing seemingly disparate issues such as individual cognition, social context, software development, discourse, and how honeybees communicate about the location of a flower might all be combined in one research study. Through these kinds of research, we can better understand teaching and learning in meaningful ways to support theorists, researchers, and practicing teachers alike. ”

My research examines the reciprocal process through which individual students learn within complex social contexts, contexts that they in turn help to define through their ongoing activity. In particular, my research aims to advance the field’s understanding of how individuals in social contexts represent their ideas externally — both in the form of inscriptions, such as drawings or computational models, and in the form of speech and gesture. While I believe that representations play a role in all learning and development, my research tends to focus on two related areas of study — the way that young students learn about complex science concepts and the potential of computational tools to support educational activities.

A recent example of this work was the study of BeeSign, a computer simulation and curriculum that I developed to examine how kindergarten and first grade students can learn about the nectar gathering behavior of honeybee hives while developing and employing new representational practices. I am also currently involved in the designing the Semiotic Pivots and Activity Spaces for Elementary Science (SPASES) project. The SPASES project aims to use new sensing technologies—such as computer vision and Nintendo Wii controllers—to help transform young children’s physical actions during pretend play into a set of symbolic representations and parameters in a physics simulation.

Research Articles

• Negotiated Representational Mediators: How Young Children Decide What to Include in Their Science Representations
• Unpacking the Mediation of Invented Representations
• At the Intersection of Classroom Culture and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: What Students’ Arguments Around Maps Reveal About How to Increase Student Achievement Within Our Diverse Society

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8459

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4074

Thomas Duffy

“Besides establishing the design principles at a theoretical and practical level, we seek to understand the strategies for supporting learners as they work in complex environments, both on-line and in classroom instruction.”

The energy and the insights students bring to the problems we study are central to the success of our research. My goal is to support the students in their own research initiatives within the framework of our program of research. It is through that student ownership that we will all grow in our understanding.

I moved from cognitive psychology, my initial training, because I wanted to work on more applied or real world problems — stuff people could use. Education provided the application context, but I found that the work tended to be fragile both in the development of testable theory and in a strong research base. My hope has been that Learning Sciences will provide the proper balance between the rich theory and research of cognitive science and the relevancy of a professional school.

Research Articles

• Learner-Centered Theory and Practice in Distance Education (Excerpt)
• LTTS Design Principles
• From Practice Fields to Communities of Practice

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8328

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4060

Melissa Gresalfi

“One of the really interesting things about the learning sciences is the focus not just on individual people, but on understanding what individual people do based on their context, situation, or environment. So rather than thinking of some people as ‘smart’ and others as ‘dumb,’ we can think about how contexts support people in ACTING in smart or less smart ways. Suddenly, the world as we understand it gets flipped on its head.”

I do what I do because I am convinced that the world as we experience it is a result of social structuring, rather than individual potential. It’s fascinating that being considered “knowledgeable” is at least as much about how particular forms of knowledge are valued as it is about individual actions. My research considers students’ mathematics learning in different contexts, specifically considering the kinds of dispositions that students develop towards mathematics. The potential findings from these projects give me hope that the kinds of inequalities that seem to be so intrinsic to our educational system and to our society could be changed.

When I’m not teaching or researching, I love to explore Bloomington. The city and surrounding areas have so many great trails, routes, and running groups; there is always something new to try. There is wonderful hiking all around Bloomington, most within a 20-minute drive from downtown, where you can walk for miles without seeing anyone.

Research Articles

• Cultivating Students’ Discipline-Specific Dispositions as a Critical Goal for Pedagogy and Equity
• Heterogeneous reasoning in learning to model

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8555

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4022

Kenneth Hay, Program Head of Learning Sciences

“The Learning Sciences program provides a great balance between deep thinking and doing important work. Too often academics get caught in their ivory towers and think and talk about great ideas that have no meaningful impact on the real world. The flip side of that is people can get too focused on doing stuff that never has an impact outside of their immediate context. The Learning Sciences approach of “basic research in applied settings” balances these two goals in powerful ways. We do important research that impacts people’s lives. Learning is transformational.”

Learning is all about change. We live in an exciting time with new technologies also transforming the way we work, socialize, and play in ways that the designers of our educational system could have never imagined. Education will be transformed in the coming years. The question is, “what will education transform into?” I believe that my work is at the edge of this transformation whether students in my projects are building virtual models of the solar system or gorillas or teacher are analyzing and sharing their teaching practice with web-based video tools. My work is engaged in scholarship that builds new possibilities for learning.

Best of all, our students almost immediately contribute to academic environment, whether it’s a psychology student bringing innovations on brain scanning techniques or a computer science student offering Web 2.0 ideas. Teachers bring in the realities from today’s classroom and scientists can ground discussions in the cutting edges of scientific thinking. This creates not only an effective team environment; it generates a powerful synergy of minds.

Research Articles

• Integrated Temporal Multimedia Data (ITMD) Research System.
• Constructing networks of activity: An in-situ research methodology.
• Constructing virtual worlds: Tracing the historical development of learner practices/understandings.
• Constructivism in practice: A comparison and contrast between apprenticeship and constructionist learning environments.

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8563

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4018

Daniel Hickey

• Situative approaches to assessment for resolving problems in educational testing and transforming communities of educational practice.
• Three is the magic number: A design-based framework for balancing formative and summative functions of assessment.
• Engaged participation vs. marginal non-participation: A stridently sociocultural model of achievement motivation.
• Integrating curriculum, instruction, assessment, and evaluation in a technology-supported genetics environment.

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8335

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4072

Richard Lesh

“Learning Sciences opens lots of different kinds of doors to a world that is rapidly changing. We produce people who are adaptable, yet powerfully grounded.”

In virtually every area where researchers have investigated proficient versus less proficient learners or problem solvers, they have noticed that those who are more proficient not only DO things differently, they also SEE or INTERPRET things differently. In mathematics and the sciences, these interpretations generally are referred to as models. My research focuses on what it means to “understand” the most significant elementary-but-powerful interpretation systems in mathematics and science – where significant here means useful beyond school in a technology-based age of information.

Learning Sciences is not just applied psychology, or applied cognition, or any other theory driven form of inquiry that is striving to be useful. Learning Sciences is problem driven. The solutions usually need to integrate thinking from more than a single theory or wisdom drawn from a single community of practitioners. Indiana University has a long history of being a hotbed of innovation in studies focusing on learning and problem solving in situations where some type of mathematical/scientific thinking is needed.

Research Articles

• Lesh, R. & Zawojewski, J. . (2006) New Directions in Problem Solving Research. In F. Lester (Ed.) Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching & Learning. National Council of Teacher of Mathematics: Reston, VA
• Kelly, A. & Lesh, R. (2006). Design Research in Mathematics, Science & Technology Education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Lesh, R., Kaput, J. & Hamilton, E. (2006) Foundations for the Future: The Need for New Mathematical Understandings & Abilities in the 21st Century. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Curriculum Vita

(812) 856-8381

W.W. Wright School of Education, Room 4024

Kylie Peppler

“If you like to blur the boundaries between disciplines and to think creatively, Learning Sciences is probably right for you. BONUS: You'll love your work.”

I really like the idea of striving to be a muse rather than a mentor. Based on the metaphor of a muse — women in mythology who acted to inspire and spark the imagination of the artist — I enjoy working with others because of the diverse values, resources and ideas that everyone brings to the table. I enjoy inspiring (and thus I am inspired by) people of all ages to more fully develop their ideas – ideas that might need shaping, but are interesting and valuable in their own right. I also like to work with students to try to illuminate what's not transparent in the world of research and Education. This is based on lessons I've learned and what I would have like to have known early in my schooling experience.

Here are the top reasons I would choose the Learning Sciences program at IU: you'll enjoy working with faculty who collaborate and who genuinely mentor. Our research is very high-profile and diverse. You’ll have many opportunities to write, publish and work on a variety of cutting-edge projects. Your peer cohort will be exceptional. Many will become leaders in research and development. The multitude of opportunities available to you, ranging from the arts, to videogames, to content learning, is really astonishing.

Research Articles

• From SuperGoo to Scratch: Creative Digital Media Production in Informal Learning
• High Tech Programmers in Low-Income Communities
• Creative Codings
• Learning in the Visual Arts and Worldviews of Young Children