Bryan Matlen

The purpose of this project is to conduct a systematic replication study of a highly promising mathematics learning intervention, interleaved practice, in 7th grade classrooms. Though psychologists have long known that interleaving and spacing improves long-term learning, the practice problems in most mathematics curricula are arranged so that the majority of problems relating to the same skill or concept are blocked together. With the interleaved practice intervention, some of the practice ...

This research team will develop and pilot test a technology-enabled adult numeracy course and corresponding professional development designed for adult basic education learners. Nearly a third of the adult population in the United States does not have sufficient numeracy skills to manage critical quantitative tasks in their daily lives and over 16 percent have low digital literacy skills. Modern technology has the potential to significantly improve access to and the quality of adult educatio...

The purpose of this project is to explore how to optimize the spatial arrangement of commonly used visuals, such as worked examples and diagrams, to facilitate visual comparison as students learn mathematics and science concepts. Visual comparison is the process of identifying the relational structure that visuals share (i.e., the correspondences between the aligned components of the compared items). Surprisingly, little is known about how to spatially arrange visuals to facilitate visual co...

Carnegie Mellon established the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER) with funding from a 2004 IES grant. With the 2009 grant, PIER continued to train scientists to conduct rigorous research on learning conditions related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment to improve academic outcomes for diverse prekindergarten through postsecondary students.