Many novice teachers learn to teach "on the job," leading to burnout and attrition among teachers and negative outcomes for students in the long term. Preservice teacher education is tasked with optimizing teacher readiness, but there is a lack of causal evidence regarding effective ways to prepare new teachers. In this paper, we use a…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have consistently been shown to improve the educational outcomes of students when used alone or combined with traditional instruction. However, building an ITS is a time-consuming process which requires specialized knowledge of existing tools. Extant authoring methods, including the Cognitive Tutor Authoring…

Modern communication between health care professionals and patients increasingly relies upon secure messages (SMs) exchanged through an electronic patient portal. Despite the convenience of secure messaging, challenges include gaps between physician and patient expertise along with the asynchronous nature of such communication. Importantly, less…

In this paper, we describe the design for PurpleState, an internship simulation that applies the epistemic game model for informed civic learning. PurpleState places students in the role of interns at a political media firm and asks them to design a media campaign on a state level policy issue. Unlike the use of these models in STEM education,…

The paper discusses the use of "Productive Disciplinary Engagement" (PDE) for a curricular project that features a technology-based alternate reality game (ARG) with the objective of teaching undergraduate students about the collaborative nature of STEM careers. Much of the PDE research uses PDE as either a design-principle or as an…

Nearly one in three students in the United States today is negatively impacted by bullying. Teachers can play a critical role in stopping bullying-related violence, but many struggle with how to engage students in difficult conversations. Traditional classroom-based pedagogy used to teach communication skills (e.g., modeling & role-play) is…

In this paper we explored whether engaging in two inquiry skills associated with data collection, designing controlled experiments and testing stated hypotheses, within microworlds for one physical science domain (density) impacted the acquisition of inquiry skills in another domain (phase change). To do so, we leveraged educational data mining…