An Institute of Education Sciences grant will fund research to develop Guru, an expert computer tutor. Guru will model the strategies and dialogue of expert human tutors and is a logical progression from AutoTutor, which models the strategies and dialogue of novice human tutors.
Guru could have a big impact on Memphis City Schools because it seeks to improve educational outcomes on the Tennessee Gateway Science Test that high school students must pass in order to receive a diploma. Ninth grade students in Memphis City Schools will participate in the research.
The primary research method is design research using the Integrative Learning Design Framework (ILDF), which will be used to integrate evaluation of Guru’s artificial intelligence components with usability data collected during student evaluations. These evaluations will include think-aloud protocols and eye tracking studies.
Andrew Olney is the principal investigator, and Art Graesser, Natalie Person (Rhodes College), and Betsy Williams (Rhodes College) are co-principal investigators.
Award amount is $1,858,176.
Workshops Address Mental Health Issues
On March 27 and 28 the Suicide, Training, Education, and Prevention Services (STEPS) sponsored two interactive workshops using dance and body movement to raise awareness about suicide, mental health issues, and the mind-body connection among college students.
Native Memphian and NYU drama graduate, Akil Davis (Dr. Rosie Bingham’s son), facilitated one workshop. He used acting techniques and carved masks to teach participants how to enter an egoless state, thus paving the way for creative expression and healing through dance and body movement.
Another workshop was facilitated by Shannon Lengerich of Columbia College in Chicago. She used elements of dance and therapy to address mental health problems, wellness, early intervention, and suicide prevention.
Child and Family
Dr. Jin Li of Brown University gave three talks in Memphis March 27 and 28. One presentation was titled “U.S. and Chinese Preschoolers’ Beliefs: Is Learning a Task or a Virtue?” and was made to the Urban Child Institute. She also presented “Learning Beliefs Across Cultures” and ”Culture and Self-Conscious Emotions: Socialization of Academic Learning Among European American Parents and Chinese Parents” on the University of Memphis campus.
Dr. Li is internationally recognized for her research on the role of culture in children’s learning.
I/O
Ron Landis has submitted a contract proposal to Naval Personnel Research Group requesting $150,000 to investigate the role of individual characteristics in predicting team performance.
Psychotherapy Research
Robert Neimeyer has received a TBR Diversity grant for approximately $100,000 to study the impact of homicide bereavement in the African American community in Memphis. Meghan McDevitt-Murphy is co-principal investigator.
Neimeyer has had a major article accepted for publication by Psychological Bulletin: Currier, J. M., Neimeyer, R. A. & Berman, J. S. (2008). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for the bereaved: A comprehensive quantitative review.
School
Tom Fagan has worked with Dr. Roland Kaser of Switzerland and the U of M attorney to establish a formal affiliation between the School Program and the Institute for Applied Psychology in Zurich.
Danielle McNamara has received a grant from National Science Foundation to examine the effectiveness of adding game-based features to iSTART, an automated reading strategy tutor. Her goal is to more effectively engage students while they practice reading strategies for science texts.
The research will contribute to the understanding of the roles that cognition and emotion play in fostering learning and the complex interplay of factors such as reading strategies, knowledge, reading skill, interest, and motivation.
During the first year of funding, prototypes will be developed, and during the second year, pilot studies to test the systems will be conducted. The latter half of the second year and the third year, researchers plan to conduct an experiment with high school students to compare the effectiveness of iSTART-The Game (iTG) and iSTART.
Researchers expect to accomplish the goal of creating a learning environment that will potentially grab the attention of needy readers and also provide valuable information concerning the potential gains from creating such environments.
This research will be conducted in collaboration with Art Graesser and computer scientists at Old Dominion University, Irwin Levinstein and Chutima Boonthum.
Behavioral Medicine
Meghan McDevitt-Murphy is working in collaboration with the VA Hospital to help Iraq veterans who have PTSD and alcoholism use disorders. The work involves doing an open trial to develop a cognitive behavioral treatment and also a trial of a single session intervention for alcohol abuse. The grant is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Behavioral Neuroscience
Guy Mittleman received the “Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Award” presented by the Society for Neuroscience.
Cognitive
A delegation from the Office of the Secretary of Defense visited the Workforce Advanced Distributed Learning (WADL) Co-Lab January 30 and 31.
The representatives visited with the purpose of exploring new avenues of collaboration among the DoD, WADL, and IIS. They interacted with dozens of faculty, staff, and graduate students who described and demonstrated recent implementations of learning technologies such as AutoTutor, MetaTutor, ARIES, and iSTART. There were also demos of automated tools for language and text analysis (Coh-Metrix), multi-channel communication (iMAP), eye tracking, and detection of emotions from dialogue, facial expressions, speech parameters, and body posture.
The visitors also met with President Raines, the provost, the vice provost of research, and the director of FIT. Xiangen Hu coordinated the visit.
Briefly . . .