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.

Jaeyoon Choi is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Jaeyoon is working in the Epistemic Analytics Lab, advised by Dr. David Williamson Shaffer. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of learning analytics and quantitative ethnography.

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.

Matthew Grondin is a joint doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology and Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include applying an embodied cognition approach to understand the underlying learning mechanisms of engineering students.

Tiffany Herder is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Tiffany’s research currently focuses on how students learn with visual representations in educational video games. .

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.

Rosanne Luu is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. she works with Dr. Martina Rau in the Learning, Representations, and Technology Lab. Her research interests focus on how students acquire representational competencies used throughout science, technology, engineering, & mathematics (STEM) education. Prior to attending UW-Madison, Rosanne worked for a nonprofit education research and evaluation organization, where she led and contributed to studies of education technology products.

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. 

Kelsey E. Schenck is a doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences area working with Dr. Mitchell Nathan. Kelsey's primary area of research uses mixed methods to investigate the relationships between spatial ability, spatial anxiety, and mathematical reasoning. More specifically, her current project studies how embodied spatial interventions can impact students’ geometric reasoning and the relationships between geometric thinking, gesture, spatial ability, and spatial anxiety.

Hanall Sung is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology. Hanall is interested in understanding collaborative learning processes by employing multimodal learning analytics approaches."

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.