Biographical Sketch

Reality "Real" Canty is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology's cognitive division and a graduate research assistant at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He earned his Bachelor of Science in Psychology at the University of Alaska Anchorage and his Master of Arts in Psychology at UIC. Real's research focuses on understanding how children use external representations (ER)--either presented or self-constructed--to solve problems and to reason in domains such as math and science. He is currently investigating the roles that knowledge about ER function (i.e., utility and optimality), ER system (i.e., correspondences between physical features of the ER and domain-specific and domain-general knowledge), and ER behavior (i.e., viable behaviors for engaging the ER) play in the child's capacity to construct diagrams when solving and reasoning about unfamiliar problem structures. A second issue of ongoing interest concerns the relationship between strategy selection and representational flexibility (i.e., the capability to associate multiple external representations with a single problem structure). What are the effects of strategy selection and representational flexibility on performance and reasoning in the child? Real collaborates with teachers, mathematicians, mathematics educators, cognitive scientists, and learning scientists to test his models and to identify their epistemological bases in the context of the classroom. He uses mixed-methods (e.g., experiments, quasi-experiments, and naturalistic observation) to address empirical questions. His work has informed the development of a reform-based mathematics curriculum and has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Susan R. Goldman, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Education and Co-Director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at UIC, is his advisor. (see link to vita below)