Please join us for a talk and discussion on Adaptive Literacy Technologies with Dr. Danielle McNamara, psychology and literacy scholar and director of the Science of Learning and Educational Technology Laboratory at Arizona State University. We will meet from 1 to 2 pm on Monday, February 18 in the Terrace Room.
What: Talk on Adaptive Literacy Technologies
When: Monday, February 18, at 1 pm
Where: Terrace Room in Norman Hall
This event is sponsored by Project LENS: Leveraging Expertise in Neurotechnologies to Study Individual Differences in Multimedia Learning (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1540888)
Danielle S. McNamara, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University. She is an international expert in the fields of cognitive and learning sciences, reading comprehension, writing, text and learning analytics, natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics, and intelligent tutoring systems. She and her team have developed two game-based intelligent tutoring systems, iSTART and Writing Pal, that provide instruction and practice to improve reading comprehension and writing. Her team is currently developing an adaptive tutoring for source-based writing, which combines instruction regarding comprehension and writing. Research on these technologies has explored methods for improving student engagement via game-based practice, enhanced adaptability functions, and assessed the usability of these systems in real world settings. She also conducts research to analyze students’ verbal protocols (e.g., essays, think-alouds, self-explanation, short answer). These analyses include NLP techniques, click-stream data, keystroke logging, and dynamical analyses. The use of these techniques has prompted the development of specialized tools (e.g., Coh-Metrix, ReaderBench, Writing Assessment Tool) allowing for efficient analyses of large text corpora. Such tools have been used in various research projects involving essay writing, reading comprehension, ITSs, collaborative learning, email, and MOOCs. She has published over 400 scholarly works (books, journal articles, chapters, proceedings) and received 30 federal grants.
