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Cognition & Development Research Groups
DOR ABRAHAMSON
Embodied Design Research Laboratory
EDUC 223B 012 | CCN 24211 | Open to all students
Tuesday, 1PM - 3PM in 4538 Tolman
dor@berkeley.edu | Web site: http://edrl.berkeley.eduEDRL, the Embodied Design Research Laboratory research group, began functioning in the spring of 2006. The group's research is characterized by a theoretical strain (embodied cognition), a methodological line (design-based research), and a disciplinary emphasis (mathematics). Thus, the laboratory hosts the full cycle of design-research projects that are geared to contribute to theory and practice of multi-modal mathematical learning and reasoning as well as to design theory.
Research-group participants share and present for discussion their own design-related work as they progress from tackling a design problem through to design, implementation, data analysis, and writing up for publication. In this research group, we: (a) design, build, and field-test learning environments that foster K-16 students' inquiry-based learning of targeted mathematical concepts; (b) develop methodologies that enable us to elicit the data we need for inquiring into questions that go beyond "Did it work?" to exploring how and why things work; (c) analyze videotaped data and student artifacts to contextualize discussions of relations between objects, media, activities, perception, and reasoning; and (d) draw on relevant literature, such as work pertaining to design frameworks, to improve our designs, enrich our interpretation of data, and articulate and present our work such that it addresses the needs and interests of a broad community of education researchers and practitioners.
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ANDREA A diSESSA
BOXER Research Group
EDUC 223B 001 | CCN 24184 | Open to all students
Thursdays, 12-2 PM in 5608 Tolman
adisessa@soe.berkeley.edu | Web site: http://dewey.soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/Professor diSessa is on sabbatical 2007-2008 so his group will not meet every week.
The Boxer Research Group deals with two long-term themes: (1) computer learning environments for learning (especially approaches to a deep computational literacy for all), and (2) conceptual development, mainly in science.
The main focus for 2007-08 is our project, "Patterns of Change and Control," which is investigating a "bottom up" version of curriculum development. "Bottom-up" means we are spending a great deal of time studying the naive knowledge state, looking mainly for secure footings for learning. The topic, "patterns...," concerns things like balance, equilibration, "tipping point," oscillation, pumping, resonance, stickiness, and so on, which we expect to show a lot of naive competence, and on which we intend to build an understanding of dynamical systems theory, which is the "professional" version this kind of knowledge about patterns.
Research issues in the Patterns Project concern the nature and content of students' naive knowledge, "natural learning paths," and plausible conceptual goals in instructed learning. A key focus is the concept of "abstract." How abstract are student ideas? How do we understand "abstraction" in learning? The role of computer representations - as simulations, analytic forms to help students learn, and as an expressive medium to help students think - will be a another key focus. Having developed, taught, and analyzed several formative classes on patterns, we will be continuing study of student competence, including both lab experiments and classroom teaching. Future planning includes work with diverse students populations. Open to all students.
http://dewey.soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/
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RANDI A ENGLE
The Discourse Interaction and Learning Lab
EDUC 223B 011 | CCN 24208 | Open to all students
Fridays, 1-3PM in 4646 Tolman
raengle@berkeley.edu | Web site: gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/RAEngle/RAEngle.htmlResearch meetings of the Discourse, Interaction and Learning Lab (DILL) are open to anyone interested in investigating how learning occurs through discourse or other forms of social interaction. My own research focuses on these issues in the context of teaching and learning in mathematics and science, but folks interested in other topics are welcome as well.
This year we are combining regular whole group meetings for students to share their ongoing research with separate meetings of working groups participating in specific projects with me. Students will be working on position papers, masters' theses, and more. I will also be working on a publication applying my productive disciplinary engagement framework (Engle & Conant, 2002 in Cognition and Instruction) to teacher-researcher collaborations.In addition, the following two working groups would be happy to have new members:
1) Explaining one successful model for supporting underrepresented students' transitions through freshmen calculus: This group collected a large corpus of data about a Professional Development Program (PDP) intensive discussion calculus section at UC Berkeley last year. We are continuing to analyze a series of student surveys, videotapes from each class meeting, and both instructor and student interviews. Current projects involve tracing the development of small group norms and how students were encouraged to engage in more sophisticated mathematical tasks. We will also be preparing a brief technical report on our preliminary findings about what made this section successful for PDP this fall. However, we have tons of data so there may be opportunities for members of this working group to propose their own investigations using it.2) Contextual influences on the transfer-of-learning: This group is finishing data collection on a tutoring experiment to test some new hypotheses I have developed about how teaching and learning interactions can be framed so students will be more likely to use what they have learned (see Engle, 2006 in the Journal of the Learning Sciences). This fall we will be quickly analyzing our pre/post assessment data for a conference paper due this fall, and then will be expanding that paper into a publication. Later in the year, planning may occur for further data collection efforts.
If you are interested in my research group and especially if you are new to it, please contact me for more information. Some working groups may be meeting that first Friday at times before or after the main group meeting. In any case, be sure to bring your calendar to that first 1-3pm meeting.
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CAROLYN HARTSOUGH
Research Seminars: Inquiry in Educational Psychology
EDUC 204C 001 | CCN 24142 | Instructor permission required
Tuesdays, 4 PM - 5:30 PM in 4529 Tolman
carolyh@socrates.berkeley.edu | Web site: gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/CSHartsough/CSHartsough.html
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SUSAN HOLLOWAY
Family and Schooling in Cultural Context
EDUC 290C 007 | CCN 24361 | Open to all students
Mondays, 1-3 PM in 4529 Tolman
S_hollo@berkeley.edu | Web site: gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/SDHolloway/SDHolloway.htmlThis research group focuses on parents' ideas -- including their conceptions about the role of parent, self-evaluation of their parenting capability, perceptions of efficacy in supporting their children's
schooling, and theories about child learning and development. We are particularly interested in how parents' perceptions are constructed within the context of culture and class.
The main activity this year will be a new project, "Family Processes in Diverse Populations" which examines stress, coping and perceptions of agency within families with a child who has Down Syndrome. In the Fall, we will conduct a review of the literature and engage in pilot interviewing in order to sharpen the research focus and identify research questions. The Spring will be devoted to developing instruments and proposal writing.
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MARCIA C LINN
Linn Research Group
EDUC 223B 002 | CCN 24187 | Open to all students
Tuesdays, 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM in 3635 Tolman (Summer Schedule - Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00)
mclinn@berkeley.edu | Web sites: http://TELSCenter.org; http://www.psych.ucla.edu/iddeas/GROUP FOCUS
This research group focuses on work associated with two NSF-funded projects.THE TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED LEARNING IN SCIENCE (TELS) CENTER FOR LEARNING AND TEACHING
TELS researchers investigate how to improve learning and instruction in science classes for students in grades 6-12, with a focus on the role that information technology can play (see TELSCenter.org). We conduct research in four main areas:• Designing and testing curricula that integrate step-by-step guidance for scientific inquiry and dynamic simulations of scientific phenomena
• Developing programs and tools to help teachers and schools use the new curricula most effectively
• Assessing the impact of the new curricula on student learning
• Creating technological tools to support designers of curricula, professional development, and assessment.
We are especially interested in knowledge integration. We examine the extent to which students develop a deeper, better integrated understanding of complex scientific topics when their classroom instruction:
• Engages them actively in scientific inquiry
• Incorporates computer simulations of real-world phenomena
• Involves collecting and analyzing dataMENTORED AND ONLINE DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL LEADERS IN SCIENCE (MODELS)
Mentored and Online Development of Educational Leaders in Science (MODELS) compares typical university-based professional development with emergent school-led professional development to identify ways to enable, support, and sustain technology-enhanced instruction that leads to improved student learning.
To investigate ways to sustain school-led programs, MODELS incorporates successful elements of university-based professional development and identifies effective emergent practices in target schools. We focus on strategic support for school-led planning, preparation of school-led mentors, evidence-based customization of instruction, and development of economic models that rely on resources in typical schools.
In the first year, MODELS has also designed and implemented an assessment approach to capture teacher and student trajectories in support of the research agenda. MODELS focuses on these questions:
• What roles do school based mentors take on and how can we support appropriate practices?
• What technology-enhanced projects do teachers integrate and how do these projects impact student learning?
• How do teachers use evidence to customize technology-enhanced curricula? And, how can we support this process?
• How can we support teacher collaboration and reflection with face-to-face and online communities?
MODELS supports school-based mentoring activities, school-led planning, customization of the instructional modules, enactment of the modules, and collaboration supports for teachers both face-to-face and online.
This group interacts as a partnership where experts in research, classroom teaching, student and teacher learning, science disciplines, technology, curriculum, and educational policy jointly design and investigate ways to take advantage of technology to improve science learning and instruction. Each group member contributes to the professional development of the others.
GROUP ACTIVITIES AND MEMBER PROJECTS
Research group activities include:
• Review of members research findings,
• planning of professional development programs,
• design of assessments and curriculum materials,
• development of effective research methods,
• critical friend feedback on papers, proposals, or designs, and
• discussions of research papers.Research of group members includes: (1) Designing and investigating artifacts such as models or simulations, assessments to measure the impact of innovations, and learning environments that support students as they carry out complex activities, (2) observing and studying how students and teachers use new technologies including programming software, models, simulations, and learning environments, (3) investigating ways to orchestrate student and teacher interactions with science activities, (4) studying the role of reasoning, metacognition, personal relevance, or other conceptual frameworks, (5) investigating issues of equity and diversity since both science and technology have been stereotyped as male domains and since access to technology varies with economic resources in our culture. Group members can collaborate with others to conduct larger projects and get help from others in conducting their own projects.
GROUP RESPONSIBILITIES
Members of the group should plan to participate in discussions, give and get feedback from a critical friend about once a month, make presentations of research papers, meet with Linn regularly, present their own research, get help on their own research, and contribute to the research of others. Contributions might include helping another participant develop a rubric, giving feedback on an activity, helping with an analysis, helping with a research activity such as observing or interviewing. New members will be mentored by existing members. New members should plan to read background papers, visit a classroom where current members are conducting research, become familiar with assessments, and reflect on their observations. Normally students enroll for 2 or 3 units.
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NORMA MING
Learning from Analogies, Comparisons, and Examples (LACE) Research Group
EDUC 223B 015 | CCN 24769 | Open to all students
Thursday, 1 PM - 3 PM in 4529 Tolman
norming@berkeley.eduThe focus of this research group is to explore the processes by which and the circumstances in which people learn most productively from comparisons, with a particular emphasis on math and science learning. Major themes include analogical transfer, contrasting cases, example-based problem-solving, and learning to generalize vs. discriminate. We will discuss methods for assessing knowledge representation as well as principles of instructional design and research design that illuminate and draw from these themes. In addition to presenting and discussing relevant readings of common interest, members will share their own research-in-progress as it relates to these themes. The mutually supportive atmosphere of the research group will provide many opportunities for lab members to obtain constructive feedback on research projects in all stages from design to analysis, as well as on drafts and revisions of papers and presentations.
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MICHAEL A RANNEY
The Reasoning Group
EDUC 223B 006 | CCN 24196 | Open to all students
Fridays, 1PM - 3PM in 4529 Tolman
ranney@soe.berkeley.edu | Web site: gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/MRanney/MRanney.htmlThe Reasoning Group, headed by Michael Ranney, is currently open to all. Historically, it has had a very broad scope, studying the variety of ways in which people reason about science, math, and society. A central, continuing, theme has been assessing, understanding, and/or improving the coherence of arguments and explanations. Current members of the group mainly focus on a general project we call Reasoning With Numbers (which has both descriptive and prescriptive flavors)--but it's hardly just about numbers and it's hardly traditional math-education research. We look at how people reason about and with numerical propositions--for instance, the immigration, murder, or abortion rates--along with other content/knowledge propositions. We tend to focus on numbers that may have policy implications. (Our Numerically Driven Inferencing paradigm usually involves eventually providing an actual rate and observing how that changes folks' minds, but we've also been analyzing what happens when we reorder our procedural steps.) In sum, all sciences (e.g., biological evolution) and mathematics are ripe for threads within the current Reasoning Group. A recent project, informally called Journalism With Numbers, involves a numeracy curriculum for future and current journalists. A goal of the curriculum is to improve news reporting and thus improve the knowledge base of those who consume news--that is, virtually all of us. The project dovetails with continuing efforts to understand, measure, and improve the population's numeracy. Default participation in Reasoning is for 2 units of S/U credit for EDUC 223B, sec. 06; letter-grades and more units are possible via negotiation. Folks are welcome to stop by and hang for a while and see what's up. Generally, the meetings are a mixture of (a) reports on ongoing or planned research, (b) reality-testing for such research (e.g., pilot-testing), and (c) "journal club" activities, in we sample readings from relevant literatures.
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GEOFFREY SAXE
Saxe Research Group
ED 223B 007 | CCN 24198 | Participation only with approval of instructor
Monday, 1PM-4PM in 4631 Tolman
saxe@berkeley.edu | Web site: http://gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/gsaxeThe research group's organizing focus is the design and implementation of studies that will lead to an instructional unit on integers and fractions at the fifth grade level. In the Fall semester the focus is on students' understanding of integers and operations with integers as represented on the number line. These interview/tutorial studies will inform lesson designs, and the designed lessons will be the focus of classroom based studies on student learning and the travel of ideas in classroom communities. In addition, projects brought forward from last semester will involve the completion of manuscripts for publication linked to the prior years work, principally the travel of ideas. There are many opportunities to engage in apprenticeship activities for participants. These will include assistance with interview and tutorial studies, participating in the development and implementation of coding schemes for interview and tutorial studies, participating in design discussions, use of software to support data entry and analysis. All seminar participants will be expected to devote at least 6-hours/week out of seminar time to seminar related work (2-units).
Some readings on which the project builds:
Saxe, G. B. (1999). Cognition, development, and cultural practices. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development(83), 19-35.
Saxe, G. B. (2005). Practices of quantification from a sociocultural perspective. In A. Demetriou & A. Raftopoulos (Eds.), Cognitive Developmental Change: Theories, Models, and Measurement (pp. 241-263). NY: Cambridge University Press.
Saxe, G. B., & Esmonde, I. (2005). Studying Cognition in Flux: A Historical Treatment of Fu in the Shifting Structure of Oksapmin Mathematics. Mind, Culture, and Activity Special Issue: Combining longitudinal, cross-historical, and cross-cultural methods to study culture and cognition, 12(3-4), 171-225.
Saxe, G. B., Shaughnessy, M. M., Shannon, A., Langer-Osuna, J. M., Chinn, R., & Gearhart, M. (2007, in press). Learning about fractions as points on a number line. In The 2007 Yearbook of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Reston, VA: NCTM.
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ALAN H SCHOENFELD
Functions Research Group
EDUC 223B 004 | CCN 24190 | Open to all students
Tuesdays, 1PM-3PM in 5612 Tolman
alans@berkeley.edu | Web site: gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/AHSchoenfeld/AHSchoenfeld.htmlThis group serves as research forum for students and others interested in varied aspects of mathematical cognition. Its agenda is to serve the research needs of its members. Thus, on demand, we may have sessions of the following types:
• Someone may want feedback on a draft of a course paper, a research plan, a dissertation proposal, a dissertation chapter, or a paper to be submitted for publication. (That includes me; I'll have chapters of the book I'm working on.) The work is distributed to the group and we go over it together.
• Someone may be working on data that's hard to make sense of, an analysis that he or she wants to try on us, or drafts of materials or assessments for proposed research. In that case, we have a working session.
• We may decide to read and discuss a particular paper or papers the group is interested in, or to discuss current events.
People give practice talks of all kinds: rehearsals for AERA, PME, NCTM, job talks, etc.
In short, we do whatever we can to help each other make sense of issues related to mathematical thinking, teaching, and learning.
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BARBARA Y WHITE
ThinkerTools Research Group
ED 223B 008 | CCN 24199 | Open to all students
Thursdays, 2PM-4PM in 2519 Tolman
bywhite@berkeley.edu | Web site: http://thinkertools.org1. Teaching Scientific Inquiry
In the first project, we are collaborating with upper elementary and middle school teachers to develop and refine instructional approaches aimed at (1) making scientific inquiry accessible to a wide range of students, and (2) enabling students to acquire widely applicable capabilities for collaborative inquiry and reflective learning.Our work includes:
Models of Expertise: Creating and testing theories of expertise and its acquisition, including models of scientific inquiry and reflective learning, which form the foundation for the instructional tools, methods, and assessments that we develop;
Inquiry Curricula: Developing instructional approaches aimed at fostering collaborative scientific inquiry and reflective learning, including creating curricular materials and teacher's guides that embody these approaches;
Software that Supports Inquiry and Reflection: Creating computer-based tools that guide students as they undertake research projects and as they reflect on their inquiry processes with the aim of improving them;
Assessments that Serve Learning: Developing alternative methods of assessment that evaluate understanding, inquiry, and metacognition, with the aim of supporting teaching and learning, as well as serving accountability purposes.2. Developing Widely Useful Capabilities Through Role Playing
The main focus of this project is on analyzing videotapes of fifth grade students playing cognitive, social, and metacognitive roles, such as the Theory Manager, the Collaboration Manager, the Planning Manager, and the Reflection Manager. These students were engaged in a curriculum, designed by our research team, in which they played such roles as they tried to understand a work of historical fiction that they were reading and discussing in groups and then as they undertook a scientific inquiry project, which was also done in groups. The aim of the curriculum is to (1) help fifth graders acquire and understand widely useful cognitive capabilities, like theorizing and synthesizing, (2) develop their collaborative skills through a focus on group processes, (3) enable them to improve metacognitive awareness and self-regulation, and (4) help students to develop theories of their own cognitive, social, and metacognitive processes with the aim of improving them. The purpose of our research team's analyses of the classroom videotapes is to investigate and understand the use of role playing and reflection as instructional tools for developing students' capabilities for learning through collaborative group work.
Undergraduate and graduate students in the ThinkerTools group typically pursue one these two areas of research. The group serves as vehicle for developing ideas and coming up with good research questions, designing studies to investigate the questions, as well as analyzing and interpreting the data.
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MARK WILSON
mrwilson@socrates.berkeley.edu; Telephone: 510-642-7966
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FRANK C WORRELL
Research Seminar
EDUC 204C 002 | CCN 24114 | Open to All Students F07
Monday, 5PM-7PM in 5527 Tolman
frankc@berkeley.edu | Web site: gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/FCWorrell/FCWorrell.html
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