Research and Publications

This poster was the beginning of my investigation into the What Teacher's Don't Know Can't Help Them project.

Educational technologies provide students opportunities for self-paced practice and immediate feedback. There is currently a push for data driven instruction (Gleason et al, 2019), and educational technologies record a lot of log data that could provide helpful insights. However, cognitive demands on teachers are already high (Sweller, 1989; Feldon, 2007). Some research on what information teachers would like to have accessible to them exists (Holstein et. al., 2017), but teachers may still be unable to use data effectively to identify where and why students are struggling (Hopfenbeck, 2020; Schwartz et al., 2016; Zou et al., 2019), and data may not be accessible to teachers in a usable way (Mandinach & Jimerson, 2016). Current dashboards are often limited and are “not typically designed to meet the needs of teachers who use them” (Holstein et al., 2017). Few studies examine how effectively teachers generate and provide actionable feedback to students from the visualized data (Feng & Heffernan, 2006; Zou et al., 2019). My goal with my research is to determine how teachers perceive, interact with, and utilize educational data, dashboards, and interfaces, particularly those that provide teachers with rich process information about students' mathematical understanding.

This was my first time using structural equation modeling on my own. As a lab we had a bunch of data from the pilot study that had just finished, so I wanted to see if our intervention helped at all with math anxiety overall. It turns out that while it may help with some subscales of math anxiety, but because I looked at the overall measure value we got some surprising results. The Math Anxiety project is one that is ongoing, and this was just beginning to scratch the surface.

This research was conducted under the lead of Dr. Julie Patock-Peckham, grant #K01AA024160, funded by The Burton Family Foundation.

Truth be told, I never planned for this to get so big. I saw a couple of problems (need to convert files by hand and sound card errors) and suggested that we change the program that we were using. When the program that I found didn't do everything exactly the same as the previous program Dr. Patock asked me if I could change it to work the same way that the previous one did. I could not. I did, however, figure out what I thought was second best and did that instead. She approved the changes and we moved on. I didn't think any more of it, but Dr. Patock had suspected that the ways that the X-BART is different from the BART would change the things that correlated with it.

Comparing the results of my X-BART to the original version of the BART we used during the pilot showed that they measured different things, and the X-BART was highly correlated with affect-free impulsivity (impulsivity not motivated by emotion). That, apparently, fulfills two of the specific aims of her grant all because I didn't want to deal with converting the files by hand and restarting the computer after every run.

Typically this graduation requirement is met by doing an off-campus, professional inquiry for a major company. Knowing that my co-author, Dave, and I were headed farther into academia Dr. Broatch (our statistics professor; co-PI) and Dr. Marshall (PI) allowed us to assist with an NSF grant sponsored CORE class, grant #1606903, to fulfill our capstone requirements. For this project we did everything from the design of the experiment to the physical soil sample collection and manipulation through data analysis and onto a final presentation.

While it was interesting to learn about the different levels of DNA analysis (and pretty cool to work with such a large data set) the most valuable part to me was seeing just how unexposed to real research the rest of the students were, and having the ability to help change that. Dave and I had both been RAs in research labs for multiple semesters at this point; we were well accustomed to the process of research. Being able to watch the other seven students go from only knowing one intermediate step to being able to see the process from start to finish was absolutely thrilling and proved, to me at least, that the CORE series of classes is definitely an important and valuable thing to be introducing to our curriculum.

To be entirely honest this was the first poster that I ever helped with as an undergrad and I can't for the life of me remember what on it I was responsible for helping with! I'm pretty sure that I found two papers that were really crucial in the development of the literature review, I think I organized the references, and I might have been the one to construct the SEM models based off of the MPlus output, but those are all guesses, haha.