The following people are members of the Jacobs Educator Program advisory board. These members also serve as the selection committee for the Jacobs Educator Award.
Advisory Board
Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver
Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver is the Barbara B. Jacobs Chair in Education and Technology, Professor of Learning Sciences and Director of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on technology support for learning about complex phenomena. As part of this work, she studies technology-support for problem-based and inquiry learning, collaborative knowledge construction, and computer supported collaborative learning. She is past editor of the Journal of the Learning Sciences, current Associate Editor of Instructional Science and she serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and the advisory board of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning. She has edited several books and has published widely in the areas of problem-based learning, technology and the learning sciences.
Dr. Thomas Brush
My research goals from a design standpoint are to develop methods and strategies for promoting inquiry-oriented learning, particularly with more open-ended instruction. This involves studying methods for integrating tools to promote cooperative, collaborative, and problem-based learning strategies into the learning environment itself and developing alternative techniques to deliver instruction to students. My current project, supported through a grant from the US Department of Education, involves designing, developing, and field-testing Web 2.0 tools to support development of technology-enhanced problem-based learning curriculum for use in both K-12 and higher education settings. The “PBL-Tech” project is focusing on PBL curriculum development efforts in the areas of science and social studies. Our science curriculum efforts can be viewed via our ssinet website.
Dr. Daniel T Hickey
I use design-based research methods and situative theories of cognition to improve learning and instruction. I focus on “participatory” approaches to assessment, motivation, & credentialing, and work in e-learning, videogames, open learning, & new media contexts. In recent years, strands of work have come together in a framework I call “Participatory Learning and Assessment.” It has proven quite effective at fostering social engagement in ways that also increases individual knowledge and group achievement. I also teach graduate courses in the Learning Sciences program.
Dr. Krista Glazewski
Dr. Krista Glazewski was interested in PBL before she knew it was called PBL. As a middle school teacher of ESL, language arts, and social studies during the mid 1990s, she sought to engage students in meaningful, cross-disciplinary inquiry. Her classroom inquiry projects ranged in scope from school dumpster excavations to home/neighborhood explorations. Instinctively, she knew that involving students in this work created a relevant, meaningful connection for them, and anecdotally she observed greater motivation, engagement, and achievement among most of her students. It was these interests that led to her doctoral work and prepared her for more systematic, rigorous investigations of Problem-Based Learning. For almost ten years she has been engaging in the scholarship of PBL, exploring questions of curricular design, student engagement, and teacher support / professional development. Most recently, her projects have sought to support the work of secondary science and elementary teachers in their efforts to consider issues of pedagogy and science knowledge as they shift toward the practice of PBL. In this context, she has examined how technology tools may support their efforts. This work has implications for how we prepare teachers and support risk-taking in their practice.
Dr. Joshua Danish
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. supported by the U.S. Department of Education. Her current research focuses on teachers’ value beliefs related technology and how those beliefs influence teachers’ technology uses and integration.
Dr. Susan Yoon
Dr. Yoon’s research in the Learning Sciences uses multiple theoretical lenses to study learning and interaction in designed interventions. In one line of research she studies how student and teacher populations can improve understanding and instruction about complex systems in middle and high school science courses. Using varying learning tools such as mobile technologies and multi-agent computational models, she investigates how abilities in important scientific practices, such as theory building, evidence-based decision-making and argumentation, can increase. This work also assesses how understanding of complex systems processes and states change through participation in curricula and activities that integrate these learning tools in classrooms. Furthermore, she examines educational system affordances and constraints (e.g., teacher learning trajectories, professional development, school-level contextual factors) that enable or impede adoption of progressive learning tools and approaches.