Congratulations to Educational Psychology professor Jennifer Cromley for being awarded funding from the National Science Foundation for a capacity-building project in collaboration with the campus' iSchool.
Cromley is the PI of the project, titled Expanding Applications of Network Analysis to STEM Education Research, which officially begins on October 1, 2022.
Exerpted from the project abstract:
To better support college students in learning about science, it is important to understand how they make connections among the concepts and ideas as they are learning. Network Analysis (NA) has potential to enable new ways of analyzing student learning data to reveal such connections. This project seeks to serve the national interest by developing the PI’s skills to apply the statistical techniques of NA to real-time data about undergraduate students’ science learning.
These novel approaches to analyzing students’ knowledge structures have potential to advance knowledge regarding, for example, which concepts are most central and how tightly linked individual pieces of knowledge are within a knowledge network. The research findings are expected to contribute fundamental understandings to both Information Processing Theory and an emerging theories of multi-text multimedia comprehension.
The principal investigator (PI) of the project will participate in professional development to hone her skills in Network Analysis and apply them to analyze data collected while college students learn about the immune system. The PI and other members of the project team will subsequently share what they learn about the use of this approach via workshops and publications, which will enable other science education researchers to apply the techniques to real-time data to make new discoveries about students’ knowledge and learning processes.
As part of the work, Cromley will take a course on NA and receive coaching from Jana Diesner, iSchool associate professor and subject matter expert.
Read the full NSF project abstract here.
