PSLC GradStudents

The PSLC Graduate Student Body is comprised of students from a variety of departments at both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, including (but not limited to) Psychology, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Education, Computer Science, Robotics, Statistics, and Linguisitics. Our mission is to fundamentally transform both how laboratory-based research is applied in real world courses, and also to make use of field-based findings to generate new learning science theory. We accomplish these goals in part through utilizing a variety of methodological approaches, including randomized control trials, think aloud protocol, data-mining studies, and in-vivo experiments.

Our Student Body offers a number of different opportunities for participating students, including a Learning Science Certificate Program, a Professional Development seminar, and an Early Career Speaker Series. The details of these are provided below.

Our current sitting Student Body Members are:

President: Bryan Matlen

Vice President: Daniel Belenky

Wiki Master: Colleen Davy

iSLC Organizers: Martina Rau & April Gaylhardt

Professional Development Series Organizer:

Recruitment Officer:

Announcements

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 cdavy1@andrew.cmu.edu. Alternatively, feel free to go in and update the list yourself!

• 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.

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	Research Interests	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
Katherine I. Martin	University of Pittsburgh, Linguistics	Alan Juffs	kim20@pitt.edu	My interests center on the adult second language acquisition of vocabulary and grammar, cognitive individual differences in language learning, language aptitude, second language reading, word recognition, and bilingualism. My methodologies include laboratory experiments (behavioral measures and eye-tracking), classroom interventions, and corpus analysis. || N/A || N/A ]
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.