Date: Feb 5, 2020 03:00pm -4:30pm
Location: Dunton Tower: Room 2203
Title: Investigating ways to support student learning of STEM topics
Speaker: Kasia Muldner
Abstract:
In this talk, I will describe research that my students and I are doing here at Carleton University on designing instructional environments and interventions to promote student learning and other positive outcomes in the STEM domains of mathematics and programming. I will begin by overviewing several of the tutoring systems that we designed, built, and evaluated to test the role of feedback specificity (e.g., do students learn better if the tutoring system provides specific hints or general hints?) and instructional content (e.g., what kinds of examples promote more learning?).
In the second part of the talk, I will describe a recent project on programming education, which was inspired my teaching experiences at Carleton. Programming can be challenging for a variety of cognitive and affective reasons, and our research acknowledges this by evaluating a range of interventions, using both artificial intelligence and educational psychology methods. For instance, we designed and evaluated (1) a mindset intervention encouraging student belief in the ability to learn to program, (2) a tutoring system for the programming activity of code tracing, and (3) presentation styles for instructional videos about the programming language Python – I will briefly overview the first two topics and focus on the third in the remainder of my talk.