As our world is increasingly filled with data visualizations, having the skills to leverage data visualizations is essential for participation in society. Confident engagement with data visualizations is critical for being an educated member of society; however, research has shown that it is difficult for individuals to digest and gain...
We are witnessing an excitement about digital games and related immersive media as these become ever more prevalent in the world. Governments, private companies, and research institutes are investing in these technologies in hopes of transforming education. However, while scholarship on digital game-based learning has been steadily growing over the...
This dissertation is about designing learning environments that foreground students’ epistemic agency as they do science in a science classroom. I build on the prior work that combines two important strands in learning sciences - agent-based modeling of complex systems and constructionism to design learning environments. I call such learning...
We live in an increasingly computational world; one that, in the near term, may require everyone to be computationally literate. Computer science (CS) education has greatly increased its reach in the last two decades with an increasing number of students having access to formal computer science classroom experiences in the...
Design problems are highly ill-structured, having “ambiguous specifications of goals, no determined solution path, and the need to integrate multiple knowledge domains” (Jonassen, 2000, p. 80). Design problems are generated by stakeholders to meet needs that exist outside of the classroom (Simon, 1973; Jonassen, 2000)—this is in contrast to most...
This dissertation uses the lens of sociomateriality to examine two cases of innovative, technology-mediated civic learning programs, a U.S. Government class in a suburban high school that engages students in a simulation of the legislative process, and an English Language Arts unit in an urban public school in which students...
Economic inequality has reached historically high levels in both the United States and in the world. The research literature in sociology and political science has long shown that individuals tend to be very persistent in their views on the determinants of economic success, although these views may be formed on...
