Learning Sciences Graduate Students

Joel Beier is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology and is a member of the Learning Representations and Technology Lab with Dr. Martina Rau. His research interests include understanding the ways that we communicate with and about visual representations in scientific contexts.

Xuesong Cang is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Her main interests including distributed scaffolding and classroom orchestration by utilizing/integrating technology (simulation or collaborative platform/interface) in middle/high school classroom teaching and learning, especially for biology or physic subjects.

Indrani Dey is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. She works in the Interactive Learning & Design Lab with Sadhana Puntambekar. Her research interests include designing and implementing technology-rich learning environments for middle-school students and distributed scaffolding. Indrani has a background in molecular biology and worked in the K-12 ed-tech start-up space in India before joining UW-Madison.

Xunyi Gao (Annie) is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. She is working in the Epistemics Analysis Lab, advised by Dr. David Williamson Shaffer. She obtained her Master's in Education Data Science at Stanford University and her bachelor's in Statistics and Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is generally interested in understanding learners' learning processes. She currently focuses on developing methodology and tools of quantitative ethnography and learning analytics. 

Before my interests in educational psychology, I completed my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering with a focus on cartilage mechanics and quantitative magnetic resonance imaging. While instructing engineering courses, I found myself pondering my own educational experiences and how I learned engineering through an embodied approach. I began teaching engineering concepts in Mechanics of Materials through embodied experiences and found this to enrich student thinking. My current research revolves around embodied learning experiences in engineering education as a alternative pedagogical approach in the discipline.

Chaeyeon Kim is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology, advised by Dr. Mitchell Nathan. Broadly, Chaeyeon is interested in immersive learning environment design and development, such as virtual and augmented reality-based learning. She has designed and implemented various types of immersive learning simulations. Her scholarly work primarily revolves around the assessment of students' performance and engagement in 3D simulation-based learning environments. Her future research aims at designing and developing an adaptive simulation-based learning system through embodied design and multimodal learning analytics in immersive settings.

Doy Kim is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Doy's research interest is in understanding the body's role in mathematics learning.

John McGinty is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. John is fascinated and intrigued by the possibilities that grounded and embodied cognition suggest for learning, and his research focuses on the design of learning interventions that use our bodies to help underrepresented young people from under-resourced communities learn math better; Specifically, John is investigating how learning activities that utilize different degrees of embodiment facilitate grounding within the instructional theory of concreteness fading, for the STEM domain of geometry.

Jihyun Rho is a doctoral student in the Learning Science area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Jihyun is interested in understanding how students interact with instructional materials and communicate with visual representation. 

Yuanru Tan is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Yuanru works in the Epistemic Analytics lab advised by Dr. David Williamson Shaffer where she creates novel approaches and statistical tools to improve the assessment of complex thinking.

Yeyu Wang is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences Area within the Department of Educational Psychology. She is interested in modeling collaborative learning process based on multi-modal data.

Fangli Xia is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Fangli is interested in examining ways to connect mathematical ideas and practices with physical motions, and designing embodied activities to help students learn mathematics better.