Educational Technology & Cognition for Engaged Citizens

To solve the serious policy problems facing our society we need more engaged citizens. As an HCI researcher, my goal is to use cognitive psychology, computer science and design to understand how people learn to become active engaged citizens and to design educational technology to support their learning. These technologies are being used by a variety of curricula including Technology Consulting in the Community, Causation and Social Policy, and Critical Thinking.

I'm currently working on:

Policy World
Policy World is a game to teach students how to reason about public policy. It embeds an intelligent cognitive tutor in an game-like inquiry environment to make teaching policy deliberation both effective and fun. This game builds on a cognitive model of deliberation and several empirical studies on how students use evidence and causal diagrams.

policy world

I've also worked on:

Lesson Study
Lesson study is a continuous improvement process in which teachers research, redesign, test, and share a single lesson. I've conducted preliminary work analyzing video data on how teachers use student interviews to learn about student thinking, and also prototyped a web-based system for sharing lesson-plans.

lesson study

iLogos
iLogos is a simple argument mapping tool that you can use for teaching or research. iLogos is currently being used by Carnegie Mellon's introductory philosophy classes.

ilogos

The Causality Lab
The causality lab is an online inquiry environment for teaching scientific reasoning in which students make hypotheses, collect data, create graphs of the data, examine statistical realtionships and build causal models of the data. I was the lead software engineer on this project from 2002-2006.

causality lab

 

 

 

 

 

About Me

I am a graduate student in the Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where I study educational technology.   [Bio]

News & Recent Work


September, 2009

Awarded the Siebel Scholarship.


July, 2009

Presented "Will Google destroy Western Democracy: Bias in policy problem solving" at AIED 2009 [Paper] [Cite]


May, 2009

Proposed a dissertation on an educational game and tutor for teaching deliberation.



Contact

Matthew W. Easterday
Carnegie Mellon University
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
matteasterday{at}cmu{dot}edu