Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The global health pandemic has made visible and in fact emphasized the need for educators around the world to re(build) caring relationships with their students, often situated in technology-mediated environments. All students, regardless of racial, cultural or socioeconomic status, benefit from a caring learning environment. My research program (CIRCLE - Computational Innovations and Research for Care-centered Learning) explores the ways in which innovative web applications and e-learning designs can play a key role in supporting such education. More specifically, it aims to create a framework for integrative analytics and design, implement and validate web-based tools to provide users with real-time information and guidance that can inform their classroom decisions in K-12 and higher education settings. The wealth of available data created by technology-enhanced activities and learning environments offers promising pathways for expanding teachers' vision and informing their decision-making during technology-mediated instruction. These pathways have implications for both research and practice, with particular applications to equitable learning and technology for global good. The intent of CIRCLE is to iteratively design and examine an integrative learning analytics framework that guides the design of technology supports for teachers and students in a pedagogy of care. Additionally, we will study how the understanding of how persuasive design principles can be integrated in the form a modern mobile-first AI-enabled web application that motivates students to engage with each other, the technology and the curriculum. We will investigate what constitutes integrative learning analytics, which forms of technology interactions are valuable to the user and study features of AI agents that empower caring (such as chat, emotion, nudging etc.). As blended learning continues to grow, it is imperative that we develop a more comprehensive set of evidence-based best practices for collaborative learning tools. This research informs such practices, as well as provides an important example of a new kind of analytics dashboard. The specific dashboard developed during this work will continue to evolve beyond this research, as educators share their best practices. We advance a new form of analytics, called "integrative analytics" that refers to a tailored array of information including (1) Human-Computer Interaction principles, (2) specific goals for learning, (3) specific teacher-posed questions, (4) social focus (individual students, groups, or the whole class), (5) particular analytics sources or forms, and (6) specific datasets. In this sense, we suggest a deep convergence of theory and practice that serves to define integrative analytics and guides its application. It is the hope of my research program that inclusive, caring environments can be fostered by including a role for such analytics as we move towards computational innovations for global good.