The Researcher
Research Agenda and Methods:
My research work has a three-fold agenda –
a) to study and improve learners’ thinking-reasoning processes as they make sense of STEM concepts by interacting with different forms of external representations (ERs). I use process analyses to closely observe and analyse learners' interaction with ERs.
b) to design cognitively informed efficient pedagogical resources and to refine extant pedagogical tools to help learners improve their conceptual understanding. I use both qualitative and quantitative methods to identify and understand the progression of learning as learners use different pedagogical resources to make sense of a concept.
c) to simplify and translate my research findings into forms which can be easily and effectively used in the complex, messy and the real contextual settings of our world. A case in point is a recently published book- 'Letters in Action' - for pre-primary learners. It is based upon two cognitive science principles of contextualizing information in real-life and linking different objects together by weaving them in a functional relationship. These two principles work together to anchor concepts in learners’ mind and facilitate both recognition and recall of letters and the associated words. You can also look at my popular science writings.
Current Projects:
I am currently working on the following research projects:
Investigating Computational thinking of middle-school students: I am collaborating with Shashaank Verma and Lazar Tony, master students in CGS at IITK, for this project.
Investigating the role of Counterfactual reasoning in promoting metacognitive awareness: I am collaborating with Sneha Chakravarty, an enthusiastic school teacher based in Gwalior. In the past, we collaborated with Prof. Koumudi Patil to understand how tasks based on 'what if..?' reasoning processes or 'counterfactual reasoning' could make an impact on the quality of students' questions in a biology classroom. You can read more about this work here.
Past Projects:
For my post-doc, I collaborated with Prof. Chandan Dasgupta's team at IITB and we worked on designing and proposing a 'solenoid' model for uncovering and improving 'critical thinking' in graduate students in an online conducted HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) course, offered by the Educational Technology program of IIT Bombay. To know more about this work, see this.
I also worked on graduate students' memetic reasoning, or their ability to reason with memes, the ideas that gain traction through the internet. To know more, see this.
We also collaborated with Prof. Sahana Murthy and Vihang Vaidya (IISER Pune) to study the use of an Augmented Reality tool, GeoSolvAR- developed by researchers at IITB, to understand its impact on middle school students' spatial perspective-taking ability.
I have also worked on 'heuristic reasoning', and 'feedback-seeking' processes. See this and this.
Other Collaborations
I have collaborated with Prof. Jayashree Ramadas to explore how a simple gesture could be used along a standard biological analogy to stimulate the process of mental visualization. Link here and here.
I have also been involved in eye-tracking studies with the LSR group. Details of this work can be found here.
For my doctoral work, I was advised by Prof. Sanjay Chandrasekharan. This collaboration has resulted in the designing of a few effective pedagogical aids. Dissecting physical models and proposing set of procedural analyses on Concept-mapping are major pedagogical contributions from this research work. For the latter work, we collaborated with Prof. Nisheeth Srivastava. You can read more about the overall project here. Taking this work forward, we have recently shown how the process of 'concept-mapping' can be used to reveal information about the quality of the final generated concept-map. Read more, here.