Jaclyn Ocumpaugh

About:

Dr. Ocumpaugh is a senior research investigator at the University of Pennsylvania and the Associate Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics, where she studies how students learn - and how students experience this learning. Her work typically focuses on learning contexts that have been constructed using AI, including Intelligent Tutoring Systems and online learning games. Drawing on her background in linguistics, sociology, and ethnographic methods, she has partnered with developers of a wide range of online learning systems and pioneered methods for scaling qualitative data that is historically difficult or labor intensive to collect. Ocumpaugh uses innovative methods to better understand how affective experiences interact with the development of interest and self-regulated learning. Recent honors include selection for the 2024-2025 Fellow at the Quantitative Ethnography Institute at the University of Wisconsin and the 2024 Test of Time Award from the International Educational Data Mining Society for a paper she coauthored in 2012.

Ocumpaugh's current work seeks to find ways to investigate cultural and individual variation across and within different student populations, which is necessary for improving the fairness of both detection of learning-related constructs and the personalized supports required to improve online learning systems. In this effort, she also serves as co-editor of Computer Based Learning in Context. This free, open-access journal is cohosted by the University of Pennsylvania and by Ateneo de Manila University, and it seeks to highlight research that allows us to better understand how cultural differences may manifest in online learning environments.