Description:

The Carnegie Mellon's Program in Interdisciplinary Research (PIER) aimed to produce scientists qualified to do rigorous research needed for evidence-based educational practice and policy. PIER fellows dealt with the bi-directional flow of ideas and challenges between laboratory studies and instructional applications. In addition to achieving expertise in a chosen discipline such as psychology, statistics, human computer interaction, and philosophy, PIER fellows formed interdisciplinary teams to assess learners' knowledge. Fellows also developed skills necessary to use cognitive science, educational technology, and advanced statistical methods to further our understanding of learning in a variety of real-world contexts and settings.

List of Completed Fellows: Below is a list of the 20 fellows who received funding support from this award and completed the training program.

*Denotes fellows who also received funding from award R305B090023.

Project Website: http://www.cmu.edu/pier

Related IES Projects: Carnegie Mellon University Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER) (R305B090023), Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (R305B150008)

Products and Publications

ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.

Select Publications From Completed Fellows:

Book Chapters

Scheines. R, Easterday, M. & Danks, D. (2007). Teaching the normative theory of causal reasoning. In Gopnik, A., & Schulz, L. (Eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation, 119–38.

Journal Articles

Ayers, E. and Junker, B.W. (2008). IRT Modeling of Tutor Performance To Predict End-of-Year Exam Scores. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 68(6): 972–987.

Easterday, M., Kanarek, J., & Harrell, M. (2009).Design requirements of argument mapping software for teaching deliberation. Online deliberation: Design, research, and practice, 317–23.

Kao, Y., Cina, A. & Gimm, J. A. (2006, December). Inside the Black Box. The Science Teacher, 73 (9), 46–49.

Kao, Y., Zenner, G., & Gimm, J. A. (2005, September). Putting Nano-Tex to the test. Science Scope, 29 (1), 37–41.

Laski, E. V. & Siegler, R. S. (2007). Is 27 a big number? Correlational and causal connections among numerical categorization, number line estimation, and numerical magnitude comparison. Child Development, 78, 1723–1743.

Wylie, R. (2007). Are we asking the right questions? Understanding which tasks lead to the robust learning of the English article system. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 158, 709.

Proceedings

Aleahmad, T., Aleven, V., and Kraut, R. (2008). Open community authoring of targeted worked example problems. In International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (pp. 216–227). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Aleahmad, T., Slotta, J. and van Joolingen, W. (2007). New authoring frameworks for integrating collaborative learning technologies. In CSCL (pp. 818–819).

Aleven, V., Ogan, A. Popescu. O., Torrey, C., and Koedinger, K. (2004). Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Tutorial Dialogue System for Self-Explanation. Intelligent Tutoring Systems 2004: 443–454.

Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., & Scheines, R. (2007). The logic of Babel: Causal reasoning from conflicting sources. In Proceedings of the Workshop on AIED Applications in Ill-Defined Domains at the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (pp. 31–40).

Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., & Scheines, R. (2007). 'Tis better to construct or to receive? Effect of diagrams on analysis of social policy. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (pp. 93–100). IOS.

Fogarty, J., Ko, A.J., Aung, H.H., Golden, E., Tang, K.P., & Hudson, S.E. (2005). Examining task engagement in sensor-based statistical models of human interruptibility. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 331–340).

Golden, E. & Bass, L. (2007). Creating Meaningful Assessments for Professional Development Education in Software Architecture. In 20th Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training (CSEET'07) (pp. 283–290). IEEE.

Golden, E., John, B.E., & Bass, L. (2005). Quality vs. Quantity: Comparing Evaluation Methods in a Usability-Focused Software Architecture Modification Task. In 2005 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, 2005. (pp. 10–pp). IEEE.

Golden, E., John, B.E., & Bass, L. (2005). The Value of a Usability-Supporting Architectural Pattern in Software Architecture Design: A Controlled Experiment. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on software engineering (pp. 460–469).

Hamner, E., Lauwers, T., Bernstein, E., Nourbakhsh, I., & DiSalvo, C. Robot (2008). Robot Diaries: Broadening Participation in the Computer Science Pipeline through Social Technical Exploration. In AAAI spring symposium: using AI to motivate greater participation in computer science (pp. 38–43).

Heilman, M. & Eskenazi, M. (2006). Language Learning: Challenges for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Proceedings of the Workshop of Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains. Proceeding of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (pp. 20–28).

Heilman, M. & Eskenazi, M. (2007). Application of Automatic Thesaurus Extraction for Computer Generation of Vocabulary Questions. In SLaTE-2007, 65–68.

Heilman, M., Collins-Thompson, K., & Eskenazi, M. (2008). An Analysis of Statistical Models and Features for Reading Difficulty Prediction. In Proceedings of the third workshop on innovative use of NLP for building educational applications (pp. 71–79).

Heilman, M., Collins-Thompson, K., Callan, J., & Eskenazi, M. (2007). Combining lexical and grammatical features to improve readability measures for first and second language texts. In Human language technologies 2007: The conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics; proceedings of the main conference (pp. 460–467).

Heilman, M., Collins-Thompson, K., Callan, J., & Eskenazi, M. (2006). Classroom Success of an Intelligent Tutoring System for Lexical Practice and Reading Comprehension. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 829–832).

Heilman, M., Zhao, L., Pino, J., & Eskenazi, M. (2008) Retrieval of Reading Materials for Vocabulary and Reading Practice. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (pp. 80–88).

Kalra, N., Lauwers, T., Dewey, D., Stepleton, T., & Dias, M.B. (2007). Iterative Design of A Braille Writing Tutor to Combat Illiteracy, Proceedings of International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (pp 1–9).

Lauwers, T., and Nourbakhsh, I. (2007). Informing Curricular Design by Surveying CS1 Educators. In 4th International Symposium on Autonomous Minirobots for Research and Edutainment.

Lauwers, T., & Nourbakhsh, I. (2008). Iterative Design of a Robot-Centered Curriculum for the Introduction to Computer Science Course In AAAI Spring Symposium: Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science (pp. 102–103).

Nourbakhsh, I., Hamner, E., Lauwers, T., Bernstein, D., & Disalvo, C. (2006). A Roadmap for Technology Literacy and a Vehicle for Getting There: Educational Robotics and the TeRK Project.In ROMAN 2006–The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp. 391–397). IEEE.

Nourbakhsh, I., Hamner, E., Lauwers, T., DiSalvo, C., & Bernstein, D. (2007). TeRK: A Flexible Tool for Science and Technology Education, AAAI Spring Symposium on Robots and Robot Venues: Resources for AI Education (pp. 118–123).

Ogan, A., Walker, E., Aleven, V., & Jones, C. (2008). Using a peer moderator to support collaborative cultural discussion. In CATS 2008: Workshop on Culturally-Aware Tutoring Systems (p. 71).

Ogan, A., Wylie, R., & Walker, E. (2006). The Challenges in Adapting Traditional Techniques for Modeling Student Behavior in Ill-Defined Domains. Workshop Proceedings on Ill-Defined Domains at the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (pp. 29).

Ogan, A., Aleven, V., & Jones, C. (2006) Culture in the Classroom: Challenges for Assessment in Ill-Defined Domains. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains at Intelligent Tutoring Systems (pp. 92–100).

Ogan, A., Jones, C., & Aleven, V. (2008) Pause, Predict, and Ponder: Use of Narrative Video to Improve Cultural Discussion and Learning. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 155–162).

Ogan, A., Jones, C., Aleven, V. (2005) Improving intercultural competence by predicting in French film. In E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (pp. 3101–3106). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Shih, B., Koedinger, K., & Scheines, R. (2008) A Response Time Model for Bottom-Out Hints as Worked Examples. In EDM, 2008, 117–126.

Walker, E., Ogan, A., Aleven, V., & Jones, C. (2008). Approaches for Supporting Discussion in an Ill-Defined Domain. In Ill-Defined Domains Workshop, Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference, pp 1–12.

Wylie, R., Mitamura, T., Koedinger, K., & Rankin, J. (2007). Doing More than Teaching Students: Opportunities for CALL in the Learning Sciences. In SLaTE-2007, 21–24.