CIRCLE Research group

Dr. Anveshna Srivastava - Her research interests focus on investigating technological tools for scaffolding and promoting the critical thinking and scientific reasoning processes amongst learners. She studies learners' interaction with different technological tools for - a) modeling critical thinking dispositions and abilities when college learners interact with different online tools, b) analyzing students' reasoning with memes, c) analyzing middle-school students' diagrams to uncover their visuospatial reasoning about biological concepts, and d) assessing students' spatial reasoning processes using the AR tool - GeoSolvAR. She is also interested in studying how learners' interactions with multiple external representations at individual or collaborative levels can be used to stimulate higher-order cognitive processes. In addition, she has recently published a basic alphabet book - Letters in Action - for pre-primary learners that emphasizes linking different concepts along with discovering their functional significance.

Navneet Kaur - Her research focuses on investigating how middle school students navigate and manage uncertainties during collaborative engineering design projects. Specifically, she investigates learners' uncertainty management strategies, factors that influence their individual and joint actions in uncertain situations, and technology-enhanced scaffolds for supporting the uncertainty management processes. In addition, Navneet also investigates novice-expert differences in uncertainty management practices in Engineering Design using thematic and interaction analysis. As an extension of her work, she hopes to design learning environments to foster productive engagement in STEM practices like inquiry, uncertainty management, and design thinking.

Narasimha Swamy - His research focuses on understanding the nature of students' feedback-seeking and its role in learning and development. The research goal is to help inform student-agency-oriented sustainable alternatives to the prevailing unilateral, teacher-driven, and culturally disconnected approaches to feedback-provision and competency development. Currently, he is studying undergraduate chemistry students' feedback-seeking during complex representational problem-solving. For analysis, he uses a combination of cultural-historical activity theory, the cost-value framework of feedback-seeking, and microgenetic method. He examines how factors related to teachers' instructional activities, the larger culture, students' characteristics, and their feedback-seeking actions shape each other. As part of his research, he has developed a keen interest in identifying and addressing inconsistencies in key interconnected educational notions such as instruction, feedback, and competence. He is also enthusiastic about the comparative study of learning theories and their applications. Informed by the current work, his emerging research interest is directed at nurturing distributed competence amongst student communities.

Herold P. Charles - His research focuses on investigating the effects of Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking (VRPT) on learners' noticing as part of decision-making in complex public scenarios.

Alekh V. - His research focuses on investigating the role of socio-material interactions in fostering distributed creativity in collaborative Makerspaces.

Rajashri Priyadarshini - Her research focuses on investigating the use of Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments (CSILE) together with models and simulations to foster collaborative refinement of students' epistemic heuristic reasoning strategies to solve complex engineering problems effectively.

Vishwas P. Badhe - His research focuses on designing learning environments for fostering students' socially shared regulation of learning and socially shared metacognition.

Nisumba Soodhani - Her research focuses on investigating the interplay between various factors that influence students’ interest, identity, and self-efficacy when they work in Makerspaces and how to foster productive making using AI agents.