My research interests are in the area of design and use of interactive technologies for helping middle school students learn science. For the past few years, I have been working on the CoMPASS project which aims to understand the cognitive as well as the contextual issues in integrating digital (nonlinear) text in design-based science classes. The project includes the software system CoMPASS, which uses conceptual and text representations to help students see the multiple relationships between science concepts and phenomena. I have been studying the cognitive issues that are involved in learning from nonlinear text in which students can follow multiple paths. Specifically, I have been analyzing navigation data using the Pathfinder and k-means clustering algorithms, and then looking into audio and video data to see what may have triggered the log activity, in order to understand students' changing representations over a period of time. I have also been examining the contextual issues such as the interplay of the roles of the teacher, peers, curriculum and the text in the complex environment of the classroom. My research methodology has included alternating between classroom studies and more "clinical" studies with small groups of children. While the classroom studies provide rich descriptions of the interactions between the various tools and agents, clinical studies in which students use the software individually have been valuable in understanding the factors that come into play (e.g., prior knowledge, metacognitive awareness while using traditional texts) when students process nonlinear texts that lack the global coherence of more traditional texts.
