Jennifer S. Groff

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In February 2020, WISE launched the WISE Innovation Hub as a platform and research collaborative to support schools in their effort to design their way to the future. Over the course of more than a year, the WISE Innovation Hub worked with three schools of varying demographics and geographical locations, to set up their own “Innovation Labs” – a re...

The rate of change in our lives today has pushed us to evolve and adapt our daily practices so quickly, that if one does not pause to reflect on them it is easy to overlook just how much our world has changed. The past 50, 20, and even just the past 10 years has produced deep and profound changes in our world. Just 20 years ago, many educational sy...

Today’s educational systems are complex, political, sociotechnical ecosystems that struggle to meet the needs of most learners and societal demands—and most critically, struggle to change. Yet, learners globally need access to high quality learning environments and coherent learning pathways that support them to thrive in our complex world. Fundame...

In the last two decades, game‐based learning environments have evolved into powerful learning tools. With the growth and evolution in complexity of these innovations, complementary work in game‐based assessment design has also begun to take shape and has generated considerable interest among a variety of education stakeholders. This is in part due...

In this paper, we briefly present a design framework, XCD, that we developed through the design of The Radix Endeavor, a multiplayer online game for STEM learning. The framework provides a method for ensuring that the learning objectives, game mechanics, and data collected are closely aligned throughout the design process. We present this method he...

Over the last several hundred years, local and national educational systems have evolved from relatively simple systems to incredibly complex, interdependent, policy-laden structures, to which many question their value, effectiveness, and direction they are headed. System Dynamics is a field of analysis used to guide policy and system design in num...

This is a 12-page summary guide from the OECD's Nature of Learning Book

In this article, Jennifer Groff explores the role of the arts in education through the lens of current research in cognitive neuroscience and the impact of technology in today's digital world. She explains that although arts education has largely used multiple intelligences theory to substantiate its presence in classrooms and schools, this relatio...

The main focus of this research project was to identify the educational benefits of console game-based learning in primary and secondary schools. The project also sought to understand how the benefits of educational gaming could transfer to other settings. For this purpose, research was carried out in classrooms in Scotland to explore learning with...

A reciprocal relationship informing both research and practice is one of the primary goals in the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE), yet the field has little documentation and analysis of such collaborations. In this article, we present case studies of three research–practice partnerships taking place between scientists and educato...

This research was commissioned by Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) in partnership with Futurelab. The main focus of the project was to identify the educational benefits of console game-based learning in primary and secondary schools. The project also sought to understand how the benefits of educational gaming could transfer to other settings an...

Ethical and moral development is a result of cognitive structures generated through experience in the pivotal stage of adolescence, during which formal education plays a critical role. Recent advancements in cognitive psychology have explored the very nature of moral development, as well as the critical role education plays in that development. Dig...

using the technology of today, in the classroom today an Education Arcade paper

Peer interactions among children have long interested social scientists. Identifying causal peer effects is difficult, and a number of studies have used random assignment to produce evidence that peers affect each other's outcomes. This focus by sociologists and economists on whether peers affect each other has not been matched by direct evidence o...

Creating effective learning environments with technology remains a challenge for teachers. Despite the tremendous push for educators to integrate technology into their class-rooms, many have yet to do so and struggle to find consis-tent success with technology-based instruction. The chal-lenges to effective technology integration have been well-doc...