Past LSSS Events
Past Speakers
I: Thursday, February 20th, 2020 – “Automatic Multi-Modal Perception of Students and Classrooms”, Jacob Whitehill
II: Monday, March 16th, 2020 – “The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion”, Sarah Rose Cavanagh
III: Monday, April 6th, 2020 – “How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching”, Michele DiPietro
Jacob Whitehill
Thursday, February 20th, 2020
1PM – 2:30PM
Kenmore Room, 9th Floor
One Silber Way
“Automatic Multi-Modal Perception of Students and Classrooms”
Machine learning offers powerful new ways of analyzing video of school classrooms that are difficult or impractical to implement with human coding. Extracted data can provide fine-grained feedback to teachers, measure the outcome of an educational intervention, or facilitate automated instruction by an AI agent. This talk will present three projects: (1) estimating student engagement with computer vision; (2) exploring the relationship between thermal comfort and learning; and (3) analyzing positive and negative climate, as defined by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), using multi-modal machine learning. Finally, the talk will discuss privacy issues as well as a methodological danger of using automatic classifiers for educational measurement.
Bio: Jacob Whitehill is an assistant professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. His research interests are in multi-modal machine learning, particularly as applied to human behavior analysis and education. His work is interdisciplinary and frequently intersects cognitive science, psychology, and learning science. Before joining WPI, he was a co-founder of Emotient, a San Diego-based startup company for automatic emotion and facial expression recognition. He is an avid teacher and has lectured, mentored, and tutored students in the USA, South Africa, Rwanda, and Germany.
Website: https://users.wpi.edu/~jrwhitehill/
Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PGyMqU0AAAAJ
Recording of the talk:
https://mymedia.bu.edu/media/Learning+Sciences+Speaker+Series+Jacob+Whitehill/1_9vz611yp
Slides: https://users.wpi.edu/~jrwhitehill/BU_LSS2019Talk.pdf
Sarah Rose Cavanagh
Due to the uncertainty around COVID-19, Dr. Cavanagh’s event has been postponed until further notice.
Please, stay tuned for an updated date and time!
Monday, March 16th, 2020
1PM – 2:30PM
River Room, 4th Floor
213 Bay State Road
“The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion”
Traditional views of education assume that reason should reign over emotion, and that the classroom should be a quiet, dispassionate space where students and instructors impartially engage with facts, figures, and theories. However, the field of education is beginning to awaken to the power of emotions to capture attention, mobilize efforts, and enhance memory.
In this interactive lecture, Cavanagh will bring to bear a wide range of evidence from the study of education, psychology, and neuroscience to suggest that targeting emotions in your presentation style, course design, and assignments is a highly potent teaching strategy.
Bio: Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a psychologist, professor, and Associate Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. Her most recent research project, funded by the Davis Educational Foundation, focuses on whether giving students tools from emotion regulation at the start of class can improve their same-day and semester-long learning. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and HIVEMIND: Thinking Alike in a Divided World. She gives keynote addresses and workshops at a variety of colleges and regional conferences, blogs for Psychology Today, and writes essays for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She’s also on Twitter too much, at @SaRoseCav.
Michele DiPietro
Monday, April 6th, 2020
1PM – 2:30PM
TBD
“How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching”
A tenet of learner-centered teaching is that learning is the litmus test of any pedagogy. Therefore, one of the most important investments professors can make is to understand the learning process so that their teaching is intentionally learning-oriented. This talk will synthesize 50 years of research on learning from the cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, developmental, and inclusiveness perspectives into seven integrated principles, and highlight some implications for effective teaching in our courses.
Bio: Dr. Michele DiPietro is the Executive Director for Faculty Development, Recognition, and the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a Professor in the Department of Statistics and Analytical Sciences at Kennesaw State University. With their former Carnegie Mellon colleagues, Dr. DiPietro is a co-author of “How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching.” They have presented hundreds of workshops and keynotes at numerous colleges and conferences, in the US and abroad, and their scholarship has been translated into 7 languages. Dr. DiPietro is a recipient of the Bob Pierleoni Spirit of POD award, the highest honor bestowed in the field of educational development.
Past Events:
Jerome Schultz, Ph.D.
Monday, September 23, 2019
1PM – 2:30PM
BU Hillel House
213 Bay State Road
Castle Room, 4th Floor
“Anxiety and Stress Go to College. Rescuing the Canary in the Coal Mine: What to Know. What to Do”
On behalf of the CTL, thank you to those who attended Jerome Schultz’s talk on Monday 9/23/19. We had an amazing turn out and we look forward to seeing you at the next event with Mia Ong on Tuesday, November 19th, 2019.
Below are links to the hand outs and slides from Dr. Schultz’s presentation in case you missed the talk or would like additional copies. Thank you!
Recommended Mental Health Self-Help Books Handout
“Interventions can salve unseen anxiety barriers” Handout
Maria (Mia) Ong, Ph.D.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
1PM – 2:30PM
BU Hillel House
213 Bay State Road
River Room, 4th Floor
“Women of Color and Two-Spirit Individuals in Technology and Computing Higher Education: Early Synthesis Findings and Portraits of Persistence”
In this talk Dr. Ong will summarize early findings from two ongoing studies. The first, co-led with Dr. Nuria Jaumot-Pascual (TERC), is a literature synthesis study, funded by the National Science Foundation, on empirical research about women of color in technology and computing higher education and careers. Dr. Ong will highlight successful individual group strategies, structural barriers, and institutional solutions identified through research studies over the past twenty years. The second study, funded by the Women of Color Collaborative in Computing, seeks to understand the supports, barriers, and identity issues that influence Native women and two-spirit individuals’ persistence in technology and computing. The study, co-led with Drs. Jaumot-Pascual and Kathy DeerInWater (AISES), synthesizes relevant literature and uses the method of photo elicitation. The shared preliminary findings will echo the participants’ voices by including photographs taken by them to represent their experiences and their words explaining the significance of their images. The presentation will conclude with interactive photo elicitation exercises and a discussion of diversity and inclusion in technology and computing learning environments.
Past Events (2018-2019):
Florence Sullivan
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
12PM – 1:30PM
Hillel House at Boston University
213 Bay State Road
2nd Floor Lounge
“How the Multi-dimensional Problem Space of Robotics Supports the Development of Computational Thinking in Adolescents”
The activity of learning robotics unfolds in a multi-dimensional problem space that presents both two and three-dimensional representations with which students may reason. This multi-dimensionality affords specific types of learning interactions that are particularly efficacious for novice and younger learners working collaboratively. Drawing on over 10 years of research, Sullivan will present findings from her research into how middle school students (ages 10-14) learn while engaged with robotics activity from cognitive, social, and affective lenses. This presentation will provide insight related to how problem-solving discussions derived from multi-dimensional interaction support student debugging, algorithmic development, and systems understanding. Sullivan will also discuss how the physical and mobile nature of the robotics device itself, motivates playful engagement with the activity, further supporting collaborative learning interactions and student development of computational thinking.
Eve Manz
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
12PM – 1:30PM
Hillel House at Boston University
213 Bay State Road
2nd Floor Lounge
“Designing for Productive Uncertainty: A Systems Perspective”
A major question in current research in science education is how to engage young students in the epistemic practices of science in ways that are meaningful to them and powerful for the development of science understandings. I draw from socio-cultural and emergent perspectives that treat practices as constituted and adapted in communities to solve shared problems. Scientific activity is driven by the need to manage uncertainty; uncertainty not only about how to explain the world, but how to represent the world in the form of an experiment, what to measure, and how to convince peers to see what the scientist wants them to see. From this perspective, students need to experience uncertainty if they are to engage meaningfully in scientific practices and develop an understanding of what those practices are for. However, while uncertainty is endemic to science, it is often daunting for students, teachers, and administrators. In this talk, I share my work to develop new models of the elementary science investigation that incorporate uncertainty as a productive support for learning. In particular, I will describe, and invite audience members to discuss, approaches to simultaneously designing for and analyzing shifts in different levels of the systems within which learning environments are embedded (for example, simultaneous shifts in student activity, teacher learning, and district infrastructure).
Nathaniel Brown
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
12PM – 1:30PM
One Silber Way, 9th Floor
(Intersection of Commonwealth Ave. and Silber Way — Entrance located on Silber Way)
Kenmore Room
“Assessment for Learning: Designing an Alternative to Grades“
Despite widespread dissatisfaction with letter grades, alternative systems like standards-based reporting and narrative reporting have struggled to displace the traditional grading system in classrooms and schools in the United States. In this talk, Dr. Brown describes the cognitive, affective, social, and societal challenges inherent in replacing grades, and the necessary features a redesigned system must incorporate — or exclude — to meet the needs of students, teachers, parents, and schools. These features are illustrated by an alternative approach to assessment and grading called progress mapping.
Designing an Alternative to Grades Presentation Slides
Meryl Alper
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
12PM – 1:30PM
BU Hillel House
213 Bay State Road
Castle Room, 4th Floor
“Disability and the Social Implications of Communication Technology”
While the field of communication increasingly addresses the role of new media in the lives of marginalized populations—spanning race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and diaspora—disability and its relationship with social, cultural, and political life is little understood. Meanwhile, people with disabilities are the largest minoritized group in the U.S.—nearly 20% of the population according to the Census. This exclusion not only masks the multifaceted ways that disability and specific disabilities intersect with other dimensions of difference, but also dislocates disability from important theoretical and conceptual debates. In this talk, I will present an overview of my on-going research on disability, youth, and communication technology in three respects: exploring the shifting nature of learning, voice, and most recently, sociality. My work aims to fundamentally alters how we conceive of the “human” in mediated human communication by incorporating insights learned from and alongside young people with disabilities.
Janet Kolodner
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
12PM – 1:30PM
One Silber Way, 9th Floor
(Intersection of Commonwealth Ave. and Silber Way — Entrance located on Silber Way)
Kenmore Room
“Drawn into Science through Mystery and Awe”
In 2016, colleagues and I set out to begin to understand how to design project challenges and the immersive worlds (virtual or real) in which they are addressed in ways that would encourage knowledge integration across projects students were working on, different topical areas in science they were encountering, and even different scientific disciplines. Informed by what is known about knowledge integration and remembering, we sought to understand the influences on the richness of learners’ memories of what they were experiencing and what would make them interested enough to want to reach back and use what they had learned earlier. Our context was 6th graders learning about pond ecosystems using Harvard’s EcoMUVE. We observed students during their two weeks using EcoMUVE and then interviewed them 2 and 3 weeks later to understand what they remembered that would allow such connection making and the circumstances during an interview when they would refer back to what they had learned.
We learned a lot about what affected the rich memories they made. We were delighted, as well, to find that many (most) of them not only became interested in ecosystems. Even more interesting, however, was observations of the ways students changed with respect to their attitudes toward science in those two weeks. The EcoMUVE experience led some students to begin connecting science to their own lives, some to recognizing that they could indeed, successfully do science, and some to think about how they would put to use the scientific practices they were learning. All had multiple experiences of wonder or awe that they were still marveling over two weeks later. We analyzed to find out what was responsible for these results. We found that mystery, agency to explore, opportunities for experiencing awe, and responsiveness to the curiosity of learners played roles in inviting students in and making them feel welcome in the environment, accomplished, and like rightful participants. Having multiple experiences of awe and feelings of accomplishment played particularly important to those feelings.
Justin Reich
Monday, April 29, 2019
12PM – 1:30PM
BU Hillel House
213 Bay State Road
Castle Room, 4th Floor
“From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies”
New education technologies are often introduced in tandem with promises to “democratize education.” Unfortunately, the benefits of these new tools often accrue primarily to the already-advantaged. In this talk, Justin Reich will present some of well-developed lines of research that explain why improving equitable outcomes through technology is so challenging, and emerging lines of research that aim at developing a set of design principles for digital equity. Background reading can be found at https://dmlhub.net/publications/good-intentions-real-outcomes-equity-design-learning-technologies/.
About the Speakers
Jerome Schultz, Ph.D. is a Clinical Neuropsychologist, on the faculty at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry. He received his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from The Ohio State University and holds a Ph.D. from Boston College. He has completed postdoctoral fellowships in both clinical psychology and pediatric neuropsychology.
For nearly four decades, Dr. Schultz specialized in the neuropsychological assessment and treatment of children and young adults with learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other special needs. He has served as a faculty member at Lesley University, Boston College, and Wright State University in Ohio. He was the founding director of the Learning Lab, a diagnostic clinic at Lesley, and served for several years at Cambridge Health Alliance as the Co-Director of the Center for Child and Adolescent Development.
Dr. Schultz currently serves as an international consultant on issues related to the neuropsychology and education of children and young adults with special needs. He is a content expert at www.Understood.org and at ADDitudemag.com, where he presents webinars and writes articles, many of which are about stress and anxiety. His book, called Nowhere to Hide: Why Kids with ADHD and LD Hate School and What We Can Do About It, examines the role of stress in learning, and has served as a practical guide for families and schools across the globe. Dr. Schultz has done extensive research about the impact of anxiety and stress on college students, and has focused his attention in recent years on this population. He is currently writing for and editing a monograph on this topic, which is slated for publication later this year. It explores the impact of stress and anxiety on student learning and behavior, and will include a review of evidence-based strategies for intervention. He will share a summary of this information during his keynote address.
Justin Reich is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an instructor in the Scheller Teacher Education Program, a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. The Teaching Systems Lab investigates the complex, technology-rich classrooms of the future and the systems that we need to help educators thrive in those settings. He is the co-founder of EdTechTeacher, a professional learning consultancy devoted to helping teachers leverage technology to create student-centered, inquiry-based learning environments. He was previously the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, where he led the initiative to study large-scale open online learning through the HarvardX Initiative, and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He earned his doctorate from Harvard University, where he created the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project, a Hewlett Foundation funded initiative to examine how social media are used in K-12 classrooms. He writes the EdTechResearcher blog for Education Week, and his writings have appeared in Science, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Educational Researcher, the Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. Justin started his career teaching wilderness medicine, and later taught high school world history and history electives, and coached wrestling and outdoor activities.
Janet Kolodner’s research career has focused on learning from experience, both the processes involved in such learning and how to foster such learning. Since the 1990’s, she has been designing middle school science curriculum and learning technologies that immerse middle schoolers in experiences they can learn science from and provide scaffolding and facilitation for learning from those experiences. A result of that research, Learning by Design (LBD), is a design-driven learning approach and an inquiry-oriented project-based approach to science learning that has children learn science from engineering design experiences. The sequencing of activities in the classroom encourages students to reflect on their design and science experiences in ways that are appropriate for integrating them well into memory. LBD curriculum units and the sequencing structures in LBD are integrated into a published 3-year middle-school science curriculum called Project-Based Inquiry Science (PBIS). Other work investigated how to help pre-teens and young teens consider who they are as thinkers and come to value informed decision making and informed production and consumption of evidence in the context of design-based learning activities. In Kitchen Science Investigators, for example, 5th and 6th graders come to think about themselves as scientific reasoners and kitchen scientists in the context of cooking and baking. Most recently, an investigation of the use of Harvard’s EcoMUVE in middle-school classrooms has led to suggestions about how to design virtual worlds in support of learning so that they motivate and sustain engagement in addition to affording deep learning.
Kolodner was founding Director of Georgia Tech’s EduTech Institute (1993-1996). She served as coordinator of Georgia Tech’s cognitive science program for many years. She is founding Editor in Chief of The Journal of the Learning Sciences (1989-2008), was a founder of the International Society for the Learning Sciences (ISLS), and served as ISLS’s first Executive Officer (2003-2005). From 2010 – 2014, Kolodner was a program officer at the US National Science Foundation and led efforts to establish and sustain the Cyberlearning Program.
Dr. Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. She researches and teaches about the social and cultural implications of communication technology, with a focus on children and families’ media use, disability and digital media, and mobile communication. She is the author of the award-winning book Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality (MIT Press, 2017) and Digital Youth with Disabilities (MIT Press, 2014). In her work, she also draws on her professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS, Nickelodeon, and Disney. Alper earned her doctoral and master’s degrees from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies and History from Northwestern University, as well as a certificate in Early Childhood Education from UCLA.
Nathaniel J. S. Brown, PhD, is Program Director of the Master of Arts in Learning Engineering at Boston College and an Associate Research Professor in the Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment department in the Lynch School of Education. Dr. Brown works on reforming assessment and grading practices, studying the cognitive and psychological effects of grades, and designing alternative methods of assessment for learning that promote growth mindsets, establish a formative classroom culture, and support learning regardless of achievement level. His expertise spans classroom assessment, standardized assessment and psychometrics, cognition and learning in STEM disciplines, student motivation, and research methodology. He received his BS in Chemistry from Harvey Mudd College, MSc in Chemistry from Cambridge University, and PhD in Science and Mathematics Education from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Boston College in 2012, Dr. Brown was faculty in the Learning Sciences department at Indiana University Bloomington.
Eve Manz is Assistant Professor of Education at Boston University specializing in Science Education. Her research focuses on the development of epistemic practices in mathematics and science; that is, supporting students to participate in making and using knowledge in powerful, disciplinary ways. She seeks to understand how to design learning environments so that practices such as modeling, experimentation, and argumentation are meaningful and useful for elementary school students. Dr. Manz works closely with elementary level in-service and pre-service teachers to design curriculum and test new approaches for engaging young students in science. She draws from her experience as an elementary school teacher and curriculum director for a science and engineering museum.
Dr. Florence Sullivan is Department Chair and Professor of Teacher Education & Curriculum Studies in the College of Education at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. “My research focuses on student collaborative learning with computational media. Specifically, I focus on collaborative creativity, problem solving, group dynamics and aspects of computational thinking as they manifest while playing with robotics or other computational media. My work has a special focus on understanding girls’ experiences in these settings. A secondary research focus is learning in online environments including many of the same concerns: collaboration, gender and problem solving. Finally, I am very interested in research methods. I am currently working on the development of a new research method that uses computational means to facilitate microgenetic analysis of discourse data; this work is funded by the National Science Foundation.”