Elliot Soloway

• Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at University of Michigan

Smart learning environments provide students with opportunities to engage in self-regulated learning (SRL). However, little research has examined how teachers leverage these opportunities. We employed a multiple-case study methodology to examine the SRL supporting instructional practices of five third-grade teachers as they implemented a science un...

Current curricula and pedagogy need to change to effectively support the learning needs of the Alphas and iGens. The Alpha Generation, children born after 2012, known as the “digital-first” generation, have grown up on hand-held, digital screens not watching television or reading paper-based books. Similarly, the iGens, also known as Gen Zs, univer...

Seeking to change computing teaching to improve computer science.

With the goal of aligning itself with Singapore’s Ministry of Education’s Masterplan 3, Nan Chiau Primary School has transformed its pedagogy from direct-instruction to inquiry-oriented, using 1:1, mobile devices as a key catalyst for that transformation. In this chapter, then, we argue that in order to make that transformation, the educators at Na...

Bridging formal and informal learning to enable students’ engaged learning is a core tenet of seamless learning. Addressing the limitations of the current studies on the innovative design and implementation of seamless learning scenarios, this chapter presents one well-designed and implemented curricular initiative at the primary school level, name...

In this paper a review of the pedagogical, technological, policy and research challenges and concepts underlying mobile learning is presented, followed by a brief description of categories of implementations. A model Mobile learning framework and dynamic criteria for mobile learning implementations are proposed, along with a case study of one site...

During the Fourth International Summit on ICT in Education (EDUsummIT, 2015) which was held in Bangkok, Thailand, members of the Thematic Working Group 2 (TWG2) discussed methods, strategies, and guidelines for some of the issues and challenges in the design, implementation, evaluation, and policy development of mobile learning. Some major key chal...

This study examined the relationship of a machine???scorable, constrained free???response computer science item that required the student to debug a faulty program to two other types of items: (1) multiple???choice and (2) free response requiring production of a computer program. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the fit of a three???fa...

The use of constructed response items in large scale standardized testing has been hampered by the costs and difficulties associated with obtaining reliable scores. The advent of expert systems may signal the eventual removal of this impediment. This study investigated the accuracy with which expert systems could score a new, non???multiple choice...

One of the curriculum goals of e-learning in school education is to develop learners for 21st century skills through their daily learning activities. This paper aims to discuss the research issues and policy implications critical for achieving such a curriculum goal. A review of literature in the related fields indicates that K-12 schools should ta...

Unlabelled: The South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, like many developing countries, is currently experiencing a shift in disease burdens from infectious to chronic diseases with economic development. A rapid increase in obesity prevalence represents one component of this "health transition." Objective: To identify behaviors associated with mea...

Increases in student achievement can be observed in classrooms where computers are used as essential tools in the curriculum. In contrast, when computers are used as supplemental to the curriculum—even in classrooms that are 1:1 (one laptop per student)—no increase in student achievement is observed. These claims are based on the analyses of a numb...

This paper reports the effects of game technology on student learning in mathematics as investigated in two data sets collected from slightly different subjects. In the first, 41 second graders (7 or 8 years old) from two classes used either a technology-based game or a paper-based game for 5 weeks. For the next 13 weeks, both classes used a techno...

The BMI distribution shifted upward in the United States between the 1960s and the 1990s, but little is known about secular trends in the pattern of BMI growth, particularly earlier in the century and early in childhood. The objective was to examine differences in BMI growth in children born in 1929-1999. BMI curves from ages 2 to 18 y were produce...

Objective: Rapid economic development and subsequent changes in lifestyle and disease burdens ('health transition') is associated with increasing prevalence of obesity among both adults and children. However, because of continued infectious diseases and undernutrition during the early stages of transition, monitoring childhood obesity has not been...

To investigate secular trends in weight and length growth from birth to 3 years of age in infants born from 1930 to 2008, and to assess whether these trends were associated with concurrent trends in pace of infant skeletal maturation and maternal body mass index. Longitudinal weight and length data from 620 infants (302 girls) were analyzed with mi...

Describes project-based learning as a comprehensive approach to classroom teaching and learning that is designed to engage students in investigation of authentic problems. Students are responsible for both the questions and the answers to such problems. Some of the advantages of project-based learning are that it promotes links among different disc...

Software maintenance programmers face the daunting task of understanding and modifying complex, unfamiliar programs that contain delocalized plans (conceptually related code that is not located contiguously in a program). Our research shows that programmers use an as-needed strategy when searching for the delocalized components which they need to u...

This paper presents the findings of a research project in which we transformed a primary (grade) 3 science curriculum for delivery via mobile technologies, and a teacher enacted the lessons over the 2009 academic year in a class in a primary school in Singapore. The students had a total of 21 weeks of the mobilized lessons in science, which were co...

In this panel, academic, non-profit, and industry professionals will ask, what does the future hold for "child-computer interaction?" Panelists will explore such issues as how new mobile, social, and ubiquitous technologies change children's future patterns of searching, exploration, and expression of information; how learning environments will be...

Mobile devices now enable students to engage in nomadic inquiry as they collect large amounts of data from the environment to answer scientific questions. To support them with constructing scientific arguments, we created CogniBits: a system designed for tablet devices that scaffolds students through creating scientific arguments with user-collecte...

Health patterns are changing in developing countries; as diet and activity patterns change with economic development, chronic disease prevalence increases, which is a characteristic of health transition. The islands of Vanuatu (South Pacific) have varying rates of economic development and provide a natural experimental model of health transition. T...

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship of students’ attitude toward mathematics, attitude toward a game, gaming performance, gender, and ethnicity as they relate to learning in an educational gaming environment. During the four-month instructional period, fifty 2nd grade students from three classes used a mobile game. This study u...

The history of science education reform has been fundamentally centered around science curriculum development and implementation. The advent of mobile technologies has necessitated a re-examination of how students could better learn science through these 21st century tools. Conventional teaching materials may not prepare students to learn the inqui...

Obesity is a global epidemic, and measures to define it must be appropriate for diverse populations for accurate assessment of worldwide risk. Obesity refers to excess body fatness, but is more commonly defined by body mass index (BMI). Body composition varies among populations: Asians have higher percent body fat (%BF), and Pacific Islanders lower...

This article describes work by a research group bringing a middle-school inquiry and technology science innovation to scale in a systemic urban school reform setting. We distinguish between scaling and scaling within systemic reform. We pose a framework for use by developers of instructional interventions to gauge their "fit" with existing school c...

One of the educational goals in science is to not only learn content but also to learn the scientific process. While there is a range of settings for this, such as classrooms and museums, they are not always well connected in educationally viable ways. We are designing Zydeco to bridge the classroom and museum environment and address the following...

Mobile computing and communications devices are becoming ubiquitous in the United States and the developed nations of the world. Young people between the ages of 5 and 19 are major consumers of these devices. Ironically, US schools have, for the most part, banned mobile devices such as cell phones from classrooms. It is predicted that there will be...

With the mass adoption of mobile computing devices by the current school generation, significant opportunities have emerged for genuinely supporting differentiated and personalized learning experiences through mobile devices. In our school-based research work in introducing mobilized curricula to a class, we observe one compelling mobilized lesson...

The notion of scaffolding learners to help them succeed in solving problems other- wise too difficult for them is an important idea that has extended into the design of scaffolded software tools for learners. However, although there is a growing body of work on scaffolded tools, scaffold design, and the impact of scaffolding, the field has not yet...

The StoryTime project explores the benefits of and issues surrounding the use of mobile finger-touch devices to support struggling writers. StoryTime is a mobile finger-touch tool designed from a learner-centered design perspective to be a supportive writing tool for children 7--9 years old. StoryTime allows children to write stories by providing s...

During the 20th century, infectious disease morbidity and mortality generally waned whereas chronic degenerative diseases posed a growing burden at the global level. The population on Saba, Netherlands Antilles has recently experienced such an epidemiologic transition, and hypertension was reported to be extraordinarily high, although no prevalence...

Rapid infant weight gain is associated with increased abdominal adiposity, but there is no published report of the relationship of early infant growth to differences in specific adipose tissue depots in the abdomen, including visceral adipose tissue (VAT). In this study, we tested the associations of birth weight, infant weight gain, and other earl...

Considerable effort has been made over the past decade to address the needs of learners in large urban districts through scaleable reform initiatives. We examine the effects of a multifaceted scaling reform that focuses on supporting standards based science teaching in urban middle schools. The effort was one component of a systemic reform effort i...

For computing to have a significant impact on teaching and learning, it is clear that each and every child needs to have a computing device for their own personal use 24/7. In our chapter we predict that a disruption will occur in the near term and that cellular phone technology will be used in primary and secondary education as the primary persona...

In this article we present a preliminary cognitive model of the process of software design. Our goal was to develop a model of expert problem-solving skills for a task in which domain knowledge played an extensive role. In our model the process of design is captured via goals-and-operators interacting with a knowledge base. We have defined the goal...

This article proposes three guidelines for mobile technology design that address the needs and goals of teachers who are considered mainstream with regard to technology use. Devices should be easy to learn and use, focused on the curriculum, and instruction-friendly. Only if the three guidelines are followed by hardware and software developers will...

Abstract The traditional responsibilitiesof a graduate student instructor (GSI) usually consist of a combination,of activities meant to aid the primary instructor for the course and to reinforce the material that is being delivered in lecture. Creating and grading homework sets, supervising labs, meeting with students in discussion sessions, and gr...

Mobile, handheld computing provides teachers and students with unprecedented, new opportunities for teaching and learning. To use these devices effectively, however, teachers need to employ instructional strategies that leverage the affordances of the devices. In turn, these affordances make it easy to employ pedagogically valuable instructional st...

We present the MUSHI (Multi-User Simulation with Handheld Integration) framework, which was designed to support middle and high school students in the acquisition of scientific concepts rooted in complex, multi-scalar phenomena. In designing a learning environment that is conducive to collaborative inquiry learning, we have combined a dynamic simul...

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of handheld gaming on student learning in mathematics. During the four-month instructional period, 50 2nd grade students from three classes used a handheld Skills Arena software program or paper-based flash cards under various conditions depending on their teacher's preference. Overall r...

We designed the MUSHI (Multi-User Simulation with Handheld Integration) framework to address two educational needs: (1) to help students learn about complex, multi-scalar systems, and (2) to help students collaborate with one another in small groups. The MUSHI system provides each student with a handheld computer that is wirelessly synchronized wit...

Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that personal, portable, wirelessly-networked technologies will become ubiquitous in the lives of learners - indeed, in many countries, this is already a reality. We see that ready-to-hand access creates the potential for a new phase in the evolution of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), characterized by "seam...

Complex systems present challenges for learners in understanding different levels of emergence. We addressed these challenges by developing a framework for a multi-user simulation with integrated handheld devices (MUSHI) that supports learners in negotiating between the local and global characteristics of a complex system. In this poster, we presen...

Recent advances in handheld and Tablet based technology have paved the way for a unique style of simulation. Drawing upon Participatory Simulation research at the University of Michigan and the MIT Media Lab [1], the Multi-User Simulations with Handheld Integration (MUSHI) framework provides a powerful simulation medium to address issues of scale a...

To meet the recent demand for reform in science education (NRC, 1996; AAAS, 1993), the Center for Highly Interactive Classrooms, Curricula, Computing in Education (hi-ce) at the University of Michigan has created inquiry-based, technology-infused curriculum at the middle-school level designed to help teachers engage in best practices in science tea...

Science education standards established by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) urge less emphasis on memorizing scientific facts and more emphasis on students investigating the everyday world and developing deep understanding from their inquiries. These approaches to instruction challen...

While appropriate as an initial focus, it is time that the educational community move beyond an emphasis on 1:1 computing (each child having his/her own personal computer) to a vision of a handheld-centric classroom, where each child not only has his/her own personal, handheld computer, but also has access to networked PCs, probeware, digital camer...

Education – especially for those in the primary and secondary grades – is in desperate need of an upgrade. Children are bored in class; teachers still use 19th century materials. And, as for the content, well, we still teach children about Mendel’s darn peas. We are failing to prepare our children to be productive and effective in the 21st century.

The notion of scaffolding learners to help them succeed in solving problems otherwise too difficult for them is an important idea that has extended into the design of scaffolded software tools for learners. However, although there is a growing body of work on scaffolded tools, scaffold design, and the impact of scaffolding, the field has not yet co...

Considerable effort has been made over the past decade to address the needs of learners in large urban districts through scaleable reform initiatives. We examine the effects of a multifaceted scaling reform which focuses on supporting standards based science teaching in urban middle schools. The effort was one component of systemic reform efforts i...

Chemation, a simple 2-D modeling and animation tool for handhelds (e.g., PalmOS computers), was developed to help teach important chemistry concepts, such as chemical reaction, conservation of mass, and the particulate nature of matter (as specified in national standards). Users build 2-D molecular models of substances and then, through a process o...

Handheld computers are mobile, flexible devices that can provide real-time, one-to-one support for students from within the context of their learning activities. This paper describes the design of three learner-centered handheld tools used as part of a nine-month classroom study involving thirty-three eighth grade students. A review of related work...

The objective of this preliminary study is to investigate whether educational video games can be integrated into a classroom with positive effects for the teacher and students. The challenges faced when introducing a video game into a classroom are twofold: overcoming the notion that a "toy" does not belong in the school and developing software tha...

This article examines why cognitively oriented technology innovations, designed to foster deep thinking and learning, have not become widespread in K−12 schools. We argue a key reason is that most design-based research does not explicitly address systemic issues of usability, scalability and sustainability. This limitation must be overcome if resea...

As computing technology has evolved, there has been significant research and a range of approaches exploring the use of computers for learning. Traditionally, the prevalent approach when developing software has been a user-centered approach that focuses on software usability to help experts in some practice effectively engage in their work. However...

There is general agreement that computing technologies have not had a significant impact on teaching and learning in K–12 in the U.S., even though billions of dollars have been spent in purchasing, equipping, and supporting the technology. Some critics of school technology use this situation to push their position that technology is not appropriate...

Our project explores the benefits and challenges of using handheld computers to support learners in creating concept maps (a type of visual outline). By synthesizing research on small user interfaces with guidelines for building desktop learning tools, we identified potential challenges to using handhelds for complex learning tasks and developed ne...

Early research on using the World Wide Web indicated that middle school students did not explore much and used Web tools naively. In response to these challenges, an on-line research engine, Artemis, was designed to provide a permanent workspace and allow students access to preselective on-line resources. This study investigated the depth and accur...

Both formal languages and automata theory (FLAT) are core to the CS curricula but are difficult to teach and to learn. This situation has motivated the development of a number of theoretical computer simulators as educational tools to allow students ...

Describes the advantages of the use of handheld computers in schools. Emphasizes cost savings, increased access, and appropriateness. Asserts that handhelds will have more impact on teaching and learning than the Internet. (PKP)

here is general agreement that computing technologies have not hiad a significant imnpact on teaching and learning in Ic12 in the 11S., even though billions of dollars have been spent in purchasing, equipping, and supporting the technology. Somne critics of school tech- nology use this situation to push their position that technology is not appropr...

We have developed a software engineering process for the design of scaffolded work environments, or SWEets. This process is inspired by the principles of learner-centered design (LCD), which is an approach that recognises learners as a unique group of novice users who must be supported in learning the content and work practices of an unfamiliar dom...

Our project explores the benefits and challenges of using handheld computers to support learners in creating concept maps (a type of visual outline). By synthesizing research on small user interfaces with guidelines for building desktop learning tools, we identified potential challenges to using handhelds for complex learning tasks and developed ne...

atories. Computer skills, information demands, and level of subject knowledge vary greatly among these user populations. Addressing the needs of high school students within a general-purpose digital library particularly stresses the flexibility of our underlying architecture. The UMDL must support services quite distinct from those that other digit...

Learner-Centered Design (LCD) is an approach to building software that supports students as they engage in unfamiliar activities and learn about a new area. LCD has been successfully used to support students using desktop computers for a variety of learning activities, and in this paper we discuss new work to extend LCD to the design of educational...

The potential of technology has not been realized in primary and secondary classrooms. What conditions aren't being met, and what must be done.

A case study of middle school student's interaction within a digital library, the differential use of interface features by students, and the issues of representation and retrieval obstacles are examined. A mechanism for evaluating user's search terms and questions is explained. Findings of a current case study indicate that student's interaction w...

Reform efforts in science education emphasize the importance of supporting students' construction of knowledge through inquiry. Project-based science (PBS) is an ambitious approach to science instruction that addresses concerns of reformers. A sample of 142 10th- and 11th-grade students enrolled in a PBS program completed the 12th-grade 1996 Nation...

A challenge for HCI researchers and designers involves developing software tools for learners to support them in mindfully doing and learning complex new work practices. Such "learner-centered" tools incorporate scaffolds-software features that address the cognitive obstacles learners face so they can engage in the work in an educationally producti...

In this panel, we will explore the impact that emerging new wireless technologies have on the way children learn, communicate and play. The challenge of interface design for children's wireless technologies will be discussed along with the opportunities these new technologies afford for social learning experiences. Panelists will discuss a range of...

Preparing a new strategy for teaching introductory computer programming.

Modeling of complex systems and phenomena is of value in science learning and is increasingly emphasised as an important component of science teaching and learning. Modeling engages learners in desired pedagogical activities. These activities include practices such as planning, building, testing, analysing, and critiquing. Designing realistic model...

This paper describes ways handheld computers have been used by students at four different Michigan schools. Regardless of age or environment, our experience has shown that the primary, and most powerful uses of handheld computers have not been for organizational purposes. While students do take advantage of the organizational abilities, handhelds a...