Camillia Matuk

New York University | NYU · Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology

TikTok, a popular short video sharing application, emerged as the dominant social media platform for young people, with a pronounced influence on how young women and people of color interact online. The application has become a global space for youth to connect with each other, offering not only entertainment but also opportunities to engage with a...

How the blurring of media forms—transmedia—became the default for how we experience narratives, and how that cultural transformation has redefined the worlds of education, entertainment, and our increasingly polarized public discourse. Over the past decade, the power of narrative has been unleashed with awesome and terrifying consequences, and it h...

As visual cultures scholars have argued, visual expression and aesthetic artifacts largely comprise the modern world. This includes the production of the school as an institution. A critical approach to education therefore must reinscribe students with the ability to see what educational processes attempt to hide and to construct an understanding o...

Purpose Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as school organization and culture, can pose barriers to subject integration. The purpose of this study...

Comics are a familiar art form that has been underexplored as a tool for data-driven storytelling in K12 classrooms. Making data comics provide an opportunity for students to contextualize data within a visual style and narrative structure. This paper focuses on the second-year implementation of an interdisciplinary curriculum in seventh grade clas...

Understanding why and how to support claims with data is a key challenge in scientific inquiry. We propose that arts-integrated approaches to data literacy have potential to increase engagement in data reasoning and support students in making data-based arguments. We co-designed a data storytelling unit, which aimed to engage 8th-grade students wit...

Critical data literacy includes understanding that data are neither neutral nor objective and social issues can be investigated through a process of data inquiry using interdisciplinary tools. We co-designed an arts-integrated data literacy unit with two middle school teachers, who implemented it with their 20 students. Building on practices based...

In the past decade, a growing awareness of citizen science, and the potential of school participation in citizen science (SPICES) has developed. At the heart of any SPICES endeavor lies a partnership representing an unconventional blend of ideas, practices, and agendas, grounded in the realms of both educational practice and scientific research. Th...

Citizen science programs offer opportunities for K-12 students to engage in authentic science inquiry. However, these programs often fall short of including learners as agents in the entire process, and thus contrast with the growing open science movement within scientific communities. Notably, study ideation and peer review, which are central to t...

Open data programs have become increasingly established at national and local levels of government. While the degree of success these programs have had in achieving their objectives remains open to question, one factor that has been identified as important to any success is the role of open data intermediaries, individuals and organizations that he...

Peer ideas can be valuable contributions to scientific inquiry. Divergent peer ideas can enrich students' thinking and encourage curiosity. Meanwhile, similar peer ideas can promote convergent thinking that can reinforce understanding. However, students need guidance in critically evaluating peer ideas in relation to their own, and in recognizing t...

Arts-integration is a promising approach to engaging more students with the humanistic aspects of data science. However, school contexts pose many barriers to realizing the potential of this approach. We conduct a design case study that compares four co-designed, arts-integrated data literacy units, each implemented in a different middle school. Da...

this paper we investigate how people become engaged with open data, what their motivations are, and the barriers and facilitators program participants perceive with regard to using open data effectively. We interview participants from a variety of backgrounds with differing levels of experience and engagement with open data. Participants include st...

With growing awareness of, and attention to, the potential of data to inform decisions across contexts, has come an increasing recognition and need to develop data literacy strategies that support people to learn to be critical of data, given this consequential nature of data use (and abuse). To achieve a just society, inequities in both capacity f...

Data‐art inquiry is an arts‐integrated approach to data literacy learning that reflects the multidisciplinary nature of data literacy not often taught in school contexts. By layering critical reflection over conventional data inquiry processes, and by supporting creative expression about data, data‐art inquiry can support students' informal inferen...

Memes have become ubiquitous artifacts of contemporary digital culture that integrate visual and textual components in order to communicate about a topic. They can be used as forms of visual argumentation that draw on cultural references while facilitating critical commentary that typically results in humorous and caustic dialogue. In this paper, w...

With the rising demand for data skills across industries and disciplines, and the prevalence of data in all aspects and levels of our lives, it is critical to find new, more effective ways to develop students' data literacies. Stories can be an accessible way for students to personally connect to, and think critically about, data and its implicatio...

Effective data literacy instruction requires that learners move beyond understanding statistics to being able to humanize data through a contextual understanding of argumentation and reasoning in the real-world. In this paper, we explore the implementation of a co-designed data comic unit about adolescent friendships. The 7th grade unit involved st...

Creative media provide opportunities to expand on the ways learners explore and find personal connections to data (Bhargava et al., 2015, D’Ignazio & Bhargava, 2016). As a form of creative media, comics offer a unique set of affordances for making sense of data (Bach et al., 2017). However, there is little if any research on how comics can activate...

Representations of the health and resources of neighborhoods, particularly those made without a community’s input, can be misleading, and can perpetuate inequities. We designed and implemented a two-week-long grade 8 unit to explore how arts-based methodologies such as photovoice can engage students critically with their communities through data. W...

We describe an online citizen science platform for human brain and behavior research that uses a participatory science learning approach to engage learners in the full spectrum of scientific inquiry. Building on an open science philosophy, it features a collaborative study design environment comprising an experiment builder, a database of validated...

Youth are often subjects, not producers of public data, which, as a result, can misrepresent their lived experiences. How can ELA-integrated approaches to data literacy engage students in (1) identifying issues of youth representation in data and (2) in thinking critically about how data are produced and used? We collaborated with four urban public...

These authors contributed equally to this work Human brain and behavior research has traditionally-and paradoxically-taken place mostly in environments that are isolated from the public: In a typical human neuroscience study, scientists recruit university students to participate in well-controlled laboratory studies, i.e., outside of humans' natura...

Youth are among the most impacted by social issues, and yet have the least agency to act on them. We explored how youth used participatory storytelling—a genre of interactive fiction that logs players’ choices as data to be analyzed—to advocate for social change. In a 4-day workshop held across 4 weeks, we guided 22 high-school-aged youth in creati...

With the rising demand for data skills across industries and disciplines, and the prevalence of data in all aspects and levels of our lives, it is critical to find new, more effective ways to develop students’ data literacies. Stories can be an accessible way for students to personally connect to, and think critically about, data and its implicatio...

Data literacy is important for supporting individuals to incorporate information from research studies into their own perspectives and decision-making processes. However, it can be challenging for students to read, understand, and relate to data. Students have to be able to traverse the representational forms that data takes on (i.e., numerical, gr...

MindHive is an online, open science, citizen science platform co-designed by a team of educational researchers, teachers, cognitive and social scientists, UX researchers, community organizers, and software developers to support real-world brain and behavior research for (a) high school students and teachers who seek authentic STEM research experien...

We explored the COVID-19 pandemic as a context for learning about the role of science in a global health crisis. In spring 2020, at the beginning of the first pandemic-related lockdown, we worked with a high school teacher to design and implement a unit on human brain and behavior science. The unit guided her 17 students in creating studies that ex...

Context is a critical consideration in CSCL research and design, yet difficult to delineate. Its definition can encompass aspects of the environment, the learners, the technology, and their histories and cultures. Depending on researchers' theoretical perspectives and the focus of their study, different aspects of context are forefronted in the dat...

Cognitive neuroscience research is typically conducted in controlled laboratory environments and therefore its contribution to our understanding of learning in real-world environments is limited. In recent years, however, portable and wearable brain devices have become more readily available for classroom-based research. Complementing existing educ...

Care is an essential, but under-conceptualized aspect of successful educational co-design. We reflect on our experiences as researchers co-designing with teachers during the COVID-19 disruption. As researchers, we reframed our goals around an ethics of care to support teachers as they strove, and at times struggled to enact care for their students....

Achieving data literacy is challenging when schools narrowly focus on statistical reasoning rather than on meaning-and inference-making. Without attention to the social contexts of data, learners can fail to develop a critical stance toward data, to understand the nature and production of data, the questions that it can answer, and the ways that da...

Equitable learning opportunities are critical to the goals of science education. However, major curriculum standards are vague on how to achieve equity goals, and educators must often develop their own resources and strategies to achieve equity goals. This study examines how educators used a comic book series designed to interest youth in virology...

Care is an essential, but under-conceptualized aspect of successful educational co-design. We reflect on our experiences as researchers co-designing with teachers during the COVID-19 disruption. As researchers, we reframed our goals around an ethics of care to support teachers as they strove, and at times struggled to enact care for their students....

School-based science inquiry tends to focus on already answered questions. We describe how we used the COVID-19 pandemic in a high school citizen science unit for students to witness and engage in real-time science. High school students developed proposals to study questions about their experiences related to the pandemic. Teacher and student inter...

Data literacy is challenging to achieve because schools tend to narrowly focus on statistical reasoning rather than on meaning- and inference-making. Without attention to the social contexts of data, learners can fail to develop a critical stance toward data, to understand the nature of data and how data are produced, the questions that it can answ...

To master the functions and tasks of a game, players must learn how to play the game. When conceptual learning outcomes are expected, additional skills are required to master those concepts. Methods, such as the Wizard of Oz technique, which require users to interact with a computer support tool, have been used to help improve usability and learnab...

Biologists use tree diagrams to illustrate phylogenetic relationships among species. However, both novices and experts are prone to misinterpret this notational form. A difficulty with reasoning with cladograms is that intuitive narrative conceptions of evolution as a linear progression interfere with perceiving the hierarchical relationships that...

Research design is challenging to learn, and students have few hands-on experiences to practice it. We explore how StudyCrafter, a platform for creating and running research studies in the form of interactive fiction games, promotes students’ perceived and measured abilities in certain key research skills. Fourteen graduate students in a game desig...

Collaborative design is a promising context for learning disciplinary and collaborative skills, but how students frame their roles impacts their participation, and is an important consideration in designing supports for interdependent, interdisciplinary collaborative activities. We examine grade 7 students’ approaches to designing board games for s...

Visual art offers unique, but underexplored opportunities to engage learners with social issues (e.g., Bhargava et al., 2016). Moreover, integrating art-based perspectives into data science reflects its multidisciplinary nature, and can allow students to approach data in ways that promote their identification with data, and as data scientists. Yet,...

Every day in the media students hear about global warming, decreasing biodiversity, and wildfires. There is public debate about the causes, future consequences, and possible solutions to these rapid changes. To participate in this public discourse, it is necessary to support learners in developing STEM literacies and identities. Climate change is d...

Game environments are being used in multiple fields to study human behavior. Just as experimental studies of human behavior are affected by their methods, games are affected by the authoring platforms and tools used to make them. We examine how the diversity of a cast of characters made available to students of game design and psychology may have i...

Transmedia design, which involves extending a narrative from one medium to another, offers a context for potentially rich, interdisciplinary learning. We explored these opportunities by creating a week-long workshop to guide 7th-grade student teams in designing games based on comic books about viruses. This design case describes the framework and r...

Automated feedback has the potential to provide significant assistance to student game creators. Here, we present a system for generating automated, critique-like feedback for students creating games in the Study-Crafter platform. We implemented a system that builds a personalized feedback report for students based on a templated format. This criti...

Interactivity and player experience are inextricably entwined with the creation of compelling narratives for interactive digital media. Narrative shapes and buttresses many such experiences, and therefore designers must construct compelling narrative arcs while carefully considering the effects of interaction on both the story and the player. As th...

Sharing ideas can strengthen students’ science explanations. Yet, how to guide uses of peers’ ideas, and what the impacts of those ideas are on students’ learning, are open questions. We implemented a web-based cell biology unit with 116 grade 7 students, and explored how peers’ ideas are used during explanation building, and how prompts to draw on...

One way to prepare research-literate citizens is to engage them in designing research studies. However, this feat is challenging and has many practical barriers. We present StudyCrafter, a new platform that makes human behavior research more accessible by using game design and gameplay as a framework for research design and participation. In a qual...

Designing with cross-domain, cross-role educators leads to innovations more likely to be adopted and sustained. Yet, there are few opportunities and little guidance to do so. We contrast the challenges and successes faced by two teams of members with diverse roles in education (pre/in-teacher, administrator, graduate student) during a summer instit...

Creating science fiction can engage both imagination and scientific reasoning. We offer examples of middle school students building science fiction explanations to justify their decisions during a week-long role-playing game (RPG) design workshop. Findings show how worldbuilding-that is, defining the game's setting, history, and characters-supporte...

Inquiry instruction often neglects graphing. It gives students few opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to take advantage of graphs, and which are called for by current science education standards. Yet, it is not well known how to support graphing skills, particularly within middle school science inquiry contexts. Using quali...

Studies in the learning sciences suggest that drawing may prove useful as a learning diagnostic and as a cognitive tool. A study has been designed to determine if drawing at dierent times while learning withan application on radiograph interpretation will improve learning and cognition. The research is ongoing, and new qualitative data reveals vari...

Science is increasingly characterized by participation in knowledge communities. To meaningfully engage in science inquiry, students must be able to evaluate diverse sources of information, articulate informed ideas, and share ideas with peers. This study explores how technology can support idea exchanges in ways that value individuals' prior ideas...

We explore youth’s learning through their design of educational science games. Such games are unique learning opportunities because they require designers to integrate diverse areas of knowledge, including experience with games, an understanding of science, knowledge of effective pedagogical strategies, and a facility with the design process (c.f.,...

Game design offers many opportunities for facilitating and understanding learning. We facilitated a 5-day game design workshop for eleven grade 7 students to design educational board games about virology. Through analyses of field notes, audio recording, and design artifacts, we illustrate conceptual change of virology through two student teams’ ga...

Visual representations are commonly used as evidence for scientific claims. However, their potential for ambiguity can lead to multiple different interpretations. Both historical and contemporary cases exist of graphs that, by virtue of their ambiguity, have propelled public debate and misunderstanding of science. For instance, temperature graphs c...

Theoretical Framework Online science inquiry environments offer opportunities for students to engage with critical science concepts and practices and challenge teachers to find new guidance and orchestration strategies. Teachers must determine who needs help, when, and how, all while moving their students toward shared goals. Drawing on the knowled...

Over the past decade, there has been an increased interest in what children learn from making their own games. Most research on children game design examines the potential for children to develop a range of skills through digital game making, such as programming skills and problem solving. While these skills are valuable for learners to develop, th...

This poster details early research on an experiment exploring the use of drawing as a learning aid and meta cognitive tool in radiolograph interpretation education.

Using graphs in science is challenging as it requires both scientific and representational fluency. We examined how different graphing activities during science inquiry helped to develop these interrelated abilities in students. Grade 7 students (N=117) worked in pairs on a web-based cell biology unit to either generate or critique graphs of the ef...

Children’s game design increases motivation for learning, and promotes a wide range of skills. This study explores the challenges and opportunities for learning when children design games of their own interest. In a 3-part after-school workshop held over 3 weeks, 13 middle school students worked in teams to create games of their choosing. Based on...

Prototyping is critical for refining designs, but to advance to this stage requires openness to changing ideas. We examine two cases of 14-year old children constructing and playtesting physical prototypes of digital games: one group characterized as flexible in their ideas, and the other characterized as fixated. Field notes, audio recordings, and...

Scientists rely on graphs to make predictions, interpret data, and articulate arguments about the phenomena they investigate. Yet, students' initial formal experiences with graphs are limited, and often restricted to their mathematics classes. We describe how we integrated graphs into a middle school science inquiry unit on cell biology. We report...

Data logged within technology-based learning environments have the potential to support instructors' orchestration of learner activities. Whereas many learning environments now feature student and teacher dashboards, which promote reflection on activities after the fact, the affordances of displaying these data in real time is only beginning to be...