PSLC GradStudents

The purpose of this page is to serve as a repository of information relevant for grad students. We hope to maintain this page as a repository of current and relevant information for graduate students currently affiliated with the PSLC, as well as grad students who hope to be in the PSLC.

Announcements

1) NSF Site Visit: October 5-6, 2011

PSLC will be having its site visit with representatives from the National Science Foundation on Wednesday and Thursday October 5th and 6th.

This visit is a pretty big deal, as it allows the PSLC to justify its existence to NSF and prove to them that they should keep funding us. For the next few years at least.

I don't think we have a finalized schedule yet, but please try to set aside as much time on those few days to come and listen to the presentations. We like to have a good showing from the grad students.

In particular, there are two events that everyone involved in the PSLC should attempt to go to:

a. The Graduate Student/Post-Doc SWOT analysis- October 6th from 10:50-11:50am; location TBA

• Each year the grads and post-docs are asked to do an analysis of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of the PSLC. The first 10-15 minutes of this, Dan Belenky will be presenting our official list. The rest of the time will be open discussion with the NSF visitors about our position as grad students. This is a great opportunity to voice your concerns (or hear your concerns voiced) and to get feedback on how to go about affecting change.

b. "Poster Session- October 5th from 1:10-2:10pm; final location TBA"

2) Next Month's Meeting- Date/Time TBD

Next month's meeting will probably be the annual Welcome New Grad Students meeting, where we describe what the PSLC is and how to get involved. Before that, we woud like to get the Wiki page all up to date.

If you can think of information that you would like listed on the Wiki page, or have suggestions on how to improve it, please e-mail Colleen Davy at cdavy1@andrew.cmu.edu and let her know.

3) PSLC grads are now responsible for keeping the List of PSLC Grads up to date.

• If you know of someone who should be added (or deleted) from this list please e-mail the webmaster at bef25@pitt.edu. Alternatively, feel free to go in and update the list yourself!

Meeting Notes

Cognitive Factors

September 24, 2010

Welcome to the new members!

Send Ruth email if you (or any new collaborators, post-docs, grad students) need to be added to the cognitive factors d-list

Send Jo email if you need to be added to the general PSLC d-list

Advisory board dates - January 20 & 21, 2011 (Thur and Fri)

Speaker Series - Rob Goldstone has agreed to come (probably before the AB)

Handout: Cognitive Factors Thrust Plan, if see you see errors send them to Chuck (link to document coming soon)

In general for Annual Report and Strategic Plan it is important to have non-text contributions; send screenshots/pictures of interventions and/or graphs of results as they come up

Also as a general reminder, it is never too early to send bullets of exciting findings, usually collected at least once a year

Talk: How does learning to write help learning to read Chinese (fMRI study) - Fan Cao Abstract Two types of instructions were given to a group of English speakers who learn Chinese as a L2. One is character writing and the other is pinyin writing. The hypothesis is that writing will facilitate the integration of orthographic, phonological and semantic representations by involving both perception and production and by emphasizing the special features of Chinese characters. fMRI scans found that sensory-motor cortex and visual-spatial representation cortex are more involved if the subject had writing experience. We also found that writing training produced more elaborated representations of orthography, phonology and semantics in the brain as compared to pinyin training.

Slides here: Media:PSLC_Sep_24_1.pdf

Next up: Colleen Davy will speak at the October meeting, likely the last week of Oct at CMU

Grad student meeting notes: 11/15/2010

1) Discussion of iSLC Conference: March 25th-27th, 2011

Theme: researching communication and communicating language

If you are interested in giving a talk or a poster, e-mail Colleen Davy at cdavy1@andrew.cmu.edu. You might also be interested in some of the workshops at iSLC. Current proposals for workshops include sessions on CLAN and the R statistical package.

Colleen needs organizers to help decide on the placement/division of themes for poster sessions and symposia.

Graduate students need to discuss their role in the Ultimate Block Party at the iSLC.

2) Advisory board meeting: January 20th -21st

Theme: PSLC sustainability

Graduate students and post-docs will present a SWOT analysis.

Grad students and post docs can present posters at the session. Grad students and post-docs from all thrusts are encouraged to present posters.

3) Meeting with post-docs: December 6th, 2010

We will prepare a joint post-doc/grad SWOT analysis to present at the advisory board meeting.

FAQs

1. What does it take to be a PSLC grad student?

Well, there are basically three ways you can be considered a PSLC grad student.

a. You work on a project that receives funding from the PSLC.

b. Your advisor or collaborator receives funding from the PSLC and asks you to be involved.

c. You want to be a PSLC grad student.

2. What types of opportunities does the PSLC have for a grad student like me?

There are a variety of different levels of involvement and types of activities that the PSLC offers.

For the casual grad student, the PSLC organizes a speaker series with talks that may be of interest to students interested in the learning sciences. These are open to whomever wishes to go. There are also monthly lunch meetings where people associated with the PSLC can give a talk on their work.

The grad student community also hopes to organize events catered toward grad students, with topics like applying for grants, finding jobs, collaboration with people at other universities, etc. These are also open to the public.

For those who wish to get more involved, the grad student community also has monthly meetings to discuss center-wide issues, read and discuss articles we believe are relevant, plan future events, etc. Again, these are open to the public.

Finally, each thrust has regular or semi-regular meetings to discuss the thrust's theoretical framework, set the research agenda, and discuss the progress of projects within that thrust. While these are open to anyone, they're probably of limited interest unless you currently have or have had a project affiliated with the thrust.

3. What is expected of me as a PSLC grad student?

If you receive funding from the PSLC, you are expected, to the extent it is possible, to attend the thrust meetings for your relevant thrust, and attend the monthly PSLC lunches. The grad student community also encourages you to come to the grad student monthly meetings, of course.

If you don't receive funding from the PSLC, but still wish to be a part of the grad student community, your level of involvement is up to you.

How do I find out about upcoming talks/meetings/events?

One option is to check the Announcements section of this page. A possibly better option would be to get on our mailing list. To do that, e-mail Jo Bodnar at jobodnar AT cs.cmu.edu and ask to be put on the PSLC general mailing list and grad student mailing list.

There is also a regularly updated calendar at our main webpage that gives a fairly complete account of most PSLC events.

4. I already consider myself a PSLC grad, and want to be included on this page! What do I have to do?

Well the great thing about the wiki page is that anybody can update it whenever they want! So, if you have an account here, and you know how to edit tables, you can just log in and add yourself!

The table formatting is a bit weird and hard to follow, so if you want to add yourself, the easiest thing to do is just copy this text:

|-
| Name  || University || Advisor || e-mail address || Bio  || Personal Webpage || Link to PSLC project page  [Project page URL Project page title]

and paste it into the appropriate place on the table. With your own information, of course.

If you don't have an account already, you can easily request one by clicking the "login/create account" button on the top right hand corner of the screen and following the instructions. Once you have an account, you can just click "Edit" above the table, and you can add yourself.

5. But that's such a pain! Isn't there an easier way?!

There sure is! If you don't want to make all that effort just to have your name and e-mail address on a page, just send your info (you could even put it in the format given above!) to our Wikimaster (yep, we made that word up!), Ben Friedline, at bef25 AT pitt.edu, and he'll put it on here.

Who Do I Ask About _______?

This is often cited as being the most frustrating part of being a new grad student wanting to get involved, and by far "the" most frequently asked question, so we created a separate section for it.

Getting on the mailing lists

To get on the mailing lists, the best thing to do is e-mail Jo Bodnar at bodnar AT CMU.edu. She is going to need to know which mailing lists you want to be on. You have several options.

1. The PSLC-PIER Distribution List Signing up for this one is going to get you the most e-mails, but if you want to be involved in the learning sciences community, this is a good one to be on.

This will give you emails about talks and meetings of general interest to people in the learning sciences community- the PIER Speaker Series, the PIER student EdBags, PSLC All Hands meetings and Speaker Series, Dissertation Proposals and Defenses, etc. You will also get e-mails about more specific meetings, like the course committee meetings and thrust meetings, which may not be of interest to you unless you are involved in those thrusts.

Oh. And you'll get a billion job posting e-mails from David Klahr as well.

2. The Graduate Student Distribution List If you're a grad student, definitely ask to put on this list. This is the list where we plan and announce our events.

3. The Thrust Distribution Lists If you should be on any of these lists, you'll know it. I'm also not entirely sure Jo can get you on these lists, but at the very least she will know who to talk to to get you on it.

But really, if no one has instructed you to get on this list, you probably don't need to.

Getting Involved With Research

Unfortunately, there is just no easy answer for this. You'll need to do some research- our suggestion would be going to the Thrust pages (on the left side of the page) and reading up on them and trying to find a project you might be interested in, and talking to the PI. Or, if there's a thrust you're interested in, start showing up to the meetings.

Getting My Name On the Wiki Page'

You can check out the FAQs section for instructions on how to add yourself, or you can just e-mail Colleen Davy at cdavy1@andrew.cmu.edu and give her your Name, Institution/Department, Advisor, E-mail, a short Bio, and your personal webpage and/or Wiki page, and she'll add it for you.

Who are the PSLC grads?

Grad Student Name	University/Department	Advisor	E-mail	Bio	Personal Webpage	PSLC Projects
Turadg Aleahmad	Carnegie Mellon, HCII	Ken Koedinger & John Zimmerman	turadg@cmu.edu	My research is in design methods for theory-driven educational technology.	[1]
Daniel Belenky	University of Pittsburgh	Timothy Nokes	dmb83@pitt.edu	I am interesting in issues of motivation and cognition. Specifically, I have been studying how achievement goals influence transfer.	N/A	Dialectical Interaction and Robust Learning
Colleen Davy	Carnegie Mellon/Psychology	Brian MacWhinney	cdavy1@andrew.cmu.edu	I am interested in how adult second language learners develop fluent speaking skills in their second language.	N/A	Spanish Sentence Production
Susan Dunlap	University of Pittsburgh	Charles Perfetti	sud4@pitt.edu	My research areas include second language learning, reading, and spelling	n/a	[2]
Benjamin Friedline	University of Pittsburgh	Alan Juffs	bef25@pitt.edu	I am interested in how adult second language learners acquire morphology in a second language.	N/A	Feature Focus in Word Learning
Nora Presson	Carnegie Mellon, Psychology	Brian MacWhinney	presson@cmu.edu	I am studying how practice conditions can improve learning of second language grammar, especially testing the effects of explicit instruction.		Second Language Grammar Instruction
Mary Lou Vercellotti	University of Pittsburgh	Dr. Nel de Jong	marylou.vercellotti@gmail.com	My research looks at complexity, accuracy, and fluency in the oral production of English as a second language.	N/A	Refinement and Fluency
Ruth Wylie	Carnegie Mellon, HCII	Ken Koedinger & Teruko Mitamura	rwylie@cs.cmu.edu	I'm interested in second language learning and self-explanation.	http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwylie	Self-Explanation and ESL

Science of Learning Relevant Courses

The PIER program offers three courses -- see the PIER Web page

See also the courses taught be any of the PSLC faculty.

(Please add the names of relevant courses and web pointers if possible!)

05832 / 05432 Cognitive Modeling & Intelligent Tutoring Systems
3:00pm-4:20pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Fall 2010
Room 3002, Newell-Simon Hall, Carnegie Mellon University
9 units
Dr. Vincent Aleven, aleven@cs.cmu.edu

Students in this course will learn about the Cognitive Tutor technology that has been demonstrated to dramatically enhance student learning in domains like math, science, and computer programming. This type of tutoring software is currently in use in 2,700 schools around the country and is used extensively as platform for learning sciences research. The technology is grounded in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and cognitive task analysis. Students will learn data-driven and theoretical methods for analyzing human problem solving and will learn to use such data to inform the design of intelligent tutoring systems. Course projects will focus on the development of an intelligent tutor using CTAT, the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (see http://ctat.pact.cs.cmu.edu). Some assignments will focus on creating cognitive models in the Jess production rule modeling language.

Students should either have programming skills, or experience in the cognitive psychology of human problem solving, or HCI / design skills, or permission from the instructor.