| Description | Join the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering for an invited guest lecture by Dr. Erin Walker. Expanding the reach of personalized learning technologies: Adapting to novel paradigms, activities, and outcomes Intelligent tutoring systems are a type of personalization technology that model how students learn and provide them with adaptive help, feedback, and support. In some cases, these systems have been demonstrated to be nearly as effective as human tutors and better than traditional forms of classroom instruction, due to their abilities to target each student’s unique needs. However, they have primarily been used to improve outcomes from individual problem-solving in well-defined domains such as math and science. Dr. Walker's research explores ways to expand intelligent tutoring approaches to a broader set of learning-related paradigms, activities, and outcomes. In this talk, she will present three examples of novel applications of intelligent tutoring systems: (1) Embodied cognition: Enhancing the English reading comprehension of Latino dual language learners using embodied cognition theory, (2) Collaboration support: Assessing student peer tutoring in mathematics and providing tailored support, and (3) Social adaptation: Improving students’ engagement through personalized social interactions within a robotic learning environment. She will close the talk with a discussion of the importance of developing personalization technologies that can adapt to a student’s learning trajectory over time, across different activities, and taking into account different potential outcomes. About Erin Walker
Dr. Erin Walker is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research uses interdisciplinary methods to improve the design and implementation of educational technology, and then to understand when and why it is effective. She is currently working on various projects that attempt to incorporate social and contextual adaptation into learning technologies, including implementing a teachable robot for mathematics learning and reimagining the design of the digital textbook. Prior to January 2013, Walker was a Computing Innovations Postdoctoral Fellow at Arizona State University. She completed her PhD in 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University in Human-Computer Interaction. Her undergraduate degree is a B.Sc. (Honors) from the University of Manitoba, awarded in 2004 in both Computer Science and Psychology. Walker's work has resulted in ten journal articles and twenty peer-reviewed full conference papers, and has included a best young researcher’s track paper award at AIED, a best paper nomination at ITS, and a best technology design nomination at CSCL. |
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