Marcelo Worsley’s research integrates artificial intelligence and data mining with multimodal interfaces to study and support human learning. He directs the technological innovations for inclusive learning and teaching (tiilt) lab which works with community and industry partners around the world to empower people and organizations through the design and use of equity focused learning tools. These tools include both pedagogical and technological solutions for in school and out of school learning. 

My plans for the Fellowship

This fellowship will help me research how to design and support student learning of computer science through sports. Sports are a cross-cultural and international phenomenon that maintain significant appeal for youth of all ages. Sports also constitute a diverse set of activities that can be practiced individually at home, among classmates during recess or physical education class, and within after-school programs and youth sports clubs. From the technological perspective, sports wearables and analytics have become increasingly prominent within professional sports, and there is an exciting opportunity to engage young people in thinking about utilizing sports technologies to improve youth athletics. My research leverages the intriguing possibilities offered through sports technologies and youth interest in athletics to enable authentic conversations and learning about computer science. Through this work, I want to investigate how we might foster everyday conversations about computer science, artificial intelligence, and data science within the context of youth sports through the design of various tools for youth and adults. 

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

My work is ultimately about creating spaces where youth engage in deep and meaningful learning while participating in the activities that they already enjoy. It is about making sure that they can bring the various aspects of their identity to the learning space and have that identity be honored and valued. In so doing, I hope for young people to see new possibilities for how they can engage with and impact the world around them using the tools of computer science.  

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Chunyan Yang is a school psychologist studying how school members interact with their ecological contexts to find their resilience individually and collectively when facing risks and adversities. Her work to date has focused on three central questions: (1) how to assess and reduce the risks and adversities experienced by vulnerable school members as individuals and as groups; (2) how to leverage promotive and protective factors in school-wide practices to alleviate the negative impacts of risks and adversities among individuals and groups; and (3) how do diverse socio-cultural and demographic contexts of individuals and groups generate or shape risks and resilience processes?  

My plans for the Fellowship

During my fellowship, I will study the role of digital technology in shaping the risk and resilience experiences of students and educators and in leveraging young learners’ and their teachers’ actionable and sustainable engagement and implementation with school-wide SEL. I will study school/district sites, where a digital platform with Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) functioning is implemented in three distinct stages to improve students’ social, emotional, and academic learning. The project aims to (1) identify the main facilitators and barriers contributing to actionable and sustainable implementation; 2) identify innovative, feasible, and cost-effective implementation strategies used by teachers and administrators that could improve students’ learning; 3) examine how above implementation determinants and outcomes vary depending on the diverse socio-economic, racial/ethnic, and cultural/linguistic backgrounds and contexts of teachers as individuals and groups. I will use a multi-level and multi-method approach to examine how digital technology interacts with school-wide SEL implementation conditions and contexts to influence students’ learning and development in authentic educational settings.  

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

While growing evidence has supported the positive impact of school-wide SEL programs and practices on students’ development and learning, evidence-based SEL programs and practices have been slow to enter typical education settings and their effects tend to fade over time. Education technology holds enormous promise to address this issue through personalizing learning, engaging the disengaged, complementing what happens in the classroom, extending learning outside the classroom, and providing access to students who otherwise might not have sufficient educational opportunities. However, we have a limited understanding of how digital technology can be leveraged to improve teachers’ and young learners’ actionable and sustainable engagement and implementation in school-wide SEL practices and programs. I hope my work will help address some of the research-practice gaps by exploring the role of digital technology in school-wide SEL implementation and the conditions under which technology can assist or hinder students and their teachers in achieving their full potential in terms of social and emotional learning and teaching. The long-term goal of my work is to help unlock education technology’s full potential in scaling up school-wide SEL practices and maximizing its impact on learning and development.  

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Noam Angrist’s research focuses on the scale-up of effective educational interventions, including effective implementation with governments. This includes conducting randomized trials with governments across contexts. A recent focus area is advancing rapid, iterative testing techniques, such as A/B testing in the social sector, an approach Angrist and his colleagues at Youth Impact – an NGO he co-founded to scale-up evidence-based approaches – have been refining over the past few years. This approach is common in the technology sector, but rare in social science, and can enable scalability and responsiveness to practitioner needs. In addition, he aims to produce public goods, such as global databases of human capital measures. A recent interest also includes meta-analysis to evaluate generalizability across contexts. 

My plans for the Fellowship

During my fellowship, I aim to, first, build the evidence base around scaling and implementation science in education, a focus of our new center: the What Works Hub for Global Education. Second, I am to expand on a recent five-country randomized controlled trial of a mobile phone tutorial intervention in post-COVID-19 settings which experience frequent disruption, due to weather shocks in the Philippines, or due to conflict in Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Prior evidence generated on this topic during COVID-19 provided some of the largest scale experimental evidence across countries in school disruption settings; this resulted in multiple scale-up efforts, demonstrating the value of multi-context, real-time evidence. Third, I will accelerate work conducting A/B tests to optimize mobile phone education approaches. Already to date we have conducted multiple A/B tests in Botswana in partnership with the government and the largest NGO in the country, Youth Impact. We will conduct half a dozen more A/B tests and publish scientific contributions on the A/B testing methodology in the social sector. 

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

The research conducted during the fellowship is expected to directly improve learning for over 5,000 children. In addition, it has the potential to influence over 1 million children across 9 countries in the next few years. Channels for influence include scale-up opportunities for the specific programs being studied as well as related efforts which the research team is actively engaged in across Afghanistan, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, Namibia, the Philippines, Somalia, South Africa, and Uganda. 

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Kristyn Sommer is a child-robot interaction researcher, and her primary work focuses on exploring how children learn from robots and how children’s relationships with their robotic teachers affects their learning. She aims to identify individual characteristics that influence children’s relationships with robots and their learning from robots to enhance the future of learning for all children. 

My plans for the Fellowship

During my fellowship I will explore how children’s social, emotional, and behavioral engagement with robotic teachers affects their learning from robotic teachers. Furthermore, I will investigate a variety of individual characteristics to identify unique traits that influence children’s ability to relate to and learn from robotic teachers. By exploring individual differences between children and across time, I hope to be able to eventually identify and target ways in which we can improve individual children’s social, emotional, and behavioral engagement with robotic teachers.  

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

During my fellowship, I will conduct the foundational work exploring what factors influence children’s learning from robotic teachers. By exploring factors unique to individual children as well as across multiple learning encounters between children and robots, we will be able to design future interventions that ensure no child is left behind or disadvantaged on this new technological frontier of learning. 

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Mauricio Romero works on a wide range of policy alternatives to improve learning outcomes in developing countries. For example, he has studied the effect of additional resources to schools, providing incentives to teachers, improving the management capacities of principals, using public-private partnerships in education, and using peer tutoring and ICT to provide personalized learning to students. His work spans three continents (e.g., Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, and Tanzania) and is mainly based on large field experiments in representative samples. This allows him to study the efficiency and equity of these policies as implemented at scale.  

My plans for the Fellowship

I hope to make progress in four areas. The first is whether the private sector can be leveraged to improve learning outcomes (and how). Nearly 20% of children in Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia attend private schools that often cater to low-income families. While there is some evidence that private schools can deliver better outcomes for children, it is not yet clear how the private sector can help contribute to the equity and efficiency of the education system as a whole. 

Second, on understanding early childhood education markets in developing countries. This includes understanding competition between private and public providers, how parents react to quality, and how to improve access to high-quality preschool education for poorer families.  

Third, I work on how to leverage ICT to provide children a personalized learning experience. While previous literature has consistently shown that interventions that tailor teaching to students’ learning levels have the largest effects on learning outcomes across different settings, teachers often lack the time (or incentives) to give children personalized instruction tailored to their needs and provide schools with extra teachers to do so is expensive. I have several projects in this area, broadly trying to figure out cost-effective ways to do this, mainly by relying on EduTech. 

Finally, I study the effects of pollution on learning outcomes. I have a series of projects studying the effects of particulate matter on learning outcomes and how to mitigate these effects (e.g., with HEPA filters). I’m also studying the effects of lead and noise pollution on learning. 

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

My research aims to understand how to better use financial resources in schools and education systems (as well as the limited time children are at school). I hope that by making my work accessible to policymakers (e.g., by writing policy briefs and presenting results to different stakeholders), future policymakers and other stakeholders can make evidence-based decisions that improve children’s educational and later-in-life outcomes. 

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Jennifer Meyer’s research explores the potential and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) in education. She focuses especially on generative AI (i.e., artificial intelligence that can create new content based on the patterns it has learned from existing data). Her work combines psychological research addressing the role of student individual differences in learning with the potential of digital technologies. She conducts randomized studies in classrooms investigating the determinants of the effectiveness of AI-powered learning interventions, for example, AI-generated feedback. Her research will contribute to the effective and equitable use of generative AI to support individualized learning in schools.  

My plans for the Fellowship

During my fellowship, I will investigate how generative AI influences learning and education, and how technologies based on generative AI can be used effectively for fostering learning within classrooms. I will explore how generative AI can be used as an individualized learning opportunity to provide students with more specific feedback tailored to their learning needs. Using generative AI allows providing feedback even for complex performances such as writing. In this work, I will focus in particular on the role of potential disparities when students work with generative AI, for example, whether learning with generative AI differs for students with different social backgrounds or levels of prior knowledge, and whether AI-based learning opportunities can contribute to closing the achievement gap between student groups. To address these questions, I plan to collaborate with software companies implementing AI in digital learning platforms to collect data from real classrooms and study psychological processes when learning with feedback in authentic situations. 

In the network of fellows, I look forward to initiating new interdisciplinary collaborations tackling the potential and challenges of AI in education and many interesting discussions!

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

With the increasing availability of generative AI tools, there are ongoing discussions on how the technological developments in the field of artificial intelligence will impact the lives of children and youth in the years to come. At this point, we do not know how these new technologies will impact students’ cognitive as well as affective-motivational development. We need to figure out how to effectively design learning opportunities (e.g., individualized feedback) with generative AI and how to implement them in classrooms. During my fellowship, I aim to increase our understanding of what generative AI will mean for education, and how we can utilize its potential, but at the same time take on potential challenges and mitigate risks. To address these questions, we need large-scale studies from authentic classrooms in international contexts capturing both students’ and teachers’ perspectives to ensure that generative AI is used effectively and equitably in schools. 

My research will provide new insights on how we can foster learning for all students. Based on these findings, my long-term goal is to contribute to providing all students with the most effective learning opportunities, and make sure more learners receive the support they need to reach their full potential.  

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The modeling of change over time in learning, cognition, and behavior involve complex statistical models to resolve short-term ups and downs in performance from long-term skill building. As a quantitative methodologist, Ethan McCormick’s research focuses on the development of timeseries and longitudinal models for understanding human development at both time scales. His primary goals are 1) to build models which test specific and meaningful theoretical hypotheses, 2) link short- and long-term longitudinal models in novel ways, and 3) promote dissemination of complex statistical results in understandable terms for applied researchers, policy makers, and the broader public. 

My plans for the Fellowship

Learning proceeds in fits and starts, periods of confusion followed by eureka moments, and partially interrupted by holidays and school absences. Evaluation, by contrast, often uses one-off, high-stakes tests where children must perform under pressure. This mismatch between natural skill learning and common methods for evaluating those skills weakens the validity of these tests and can disadvantage children from less-privileged backgrounds. During my fellowship, I will develop statistical models for continuous tracking of math learning and validate continuous metrics of ability against traditional one-off testing. 

My first projects will focus on developing statistical models which accommodate two aspects of tracking short- and long-term math ability development: 1) distinguishing between practice-related improvements (e.g., memorization/recall) on given sets of math problems and generalizable learning. The second is to link timeseries models for weekly problems sets (i.e., dense, short-term data) with longitudinal growth models which capture long-term changes across educational years. I will then take the results of these first projects and the compare model-based estimates with the results of end-of-year testing, and explore the role of contextual (e.g., SES) and personal (e.g., immigrant background, minority status) factors to explore whether minoritized students are especially disadvantaged by the current testing paradigm. 

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

The educational landscape is changing rapidly, with transitions to remote/hybrid learning, changing demographics, and the increased incorporation of technology into the classroom. While these changes present challenges for traditional education models, they also provide the opportunity for data-rich evaluation of new approaches and heuristics for measuring educational success. During my fellowship, I will generate new insights for the possibility of measuring academic achievement continuously, rather than the traditional model of one-off end-of-year testing to evaluate proficiency. If these models prove successful, this will impact the lives of children and their families in numerous ways. Lessening reliance on end-of-year testing will remove a large source of pressure and stress for students and families as ability can be continuously evaluated throughout the year, minimizing the impact of any one mistake/challenge. Furthermore, this approach has the potential to mitigate some disadvantages that certain students face, including lower socioeconomic and minority status. These factors often introduce precarity for students which can exacerbate the chances for underestimating their ability when their broader challenges align with testing periods. The larger aim of my research for society is to evaluate whether continuous measures of ability show reduced bias towards these disadvantaged populations. 

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Dr. Julian Jara-Ettinger’s research aims to understand the powerful forms of social learning and reasoning that enable humans to share what we know and to rely on others to learn what we don’t. To achieve this, he combines developmental, computational, and cross-cultural approaches to study the developmental origins of how we learn to understand each other and transmit knowledge efficiently. His research ultimately hopes to capture universal principles of human social cognition and how they are shaped by culturally variable experiences. 

My plans for the Fellowship

During my fellowship, I plan to study the basic concepts that children need in order to be able to engage in complex forms of social learning. To achieve this, I plan to recruit a large socio-economically and culturally diverse sample of children to be tested online, in collaboration with other current and past members of the Jacobs network. Specifically, children will participate on a battery of tasks testing for abilities that are thought to affect social learning. These include the ability to calibrate how much to trust or to question others, the ability to think about other people’s minds, and the ability to represent alternative possibilities. By then testing how children perform in more complex social reasoning tasks, I aim to use computational models of cognitive development to capture the relationship between basic social capacities and complex social learning, with a particular focus on identifying variability across children. 

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

Understanding how children learn from others is an important problem that spans across borders and cultures. Creating a meaningful and long-lasting impact on children’s lives around the world requires strong pipelines that start with basic research and end with practical applications and policies. By helping reveal what capacities allow children to become powerful social learners, I hope my work will lay a foundation for understand how these capacities vary across children and cultures. This, in turn, can help us understand how to best support children in different cultural contexts, and have the foundations for the development of targeted interventions for children growing up in disadvantaged backgrounds. 

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Zack Hawes’s research combines methods and ideas from psychology, education, and neuroscience to advance the understanding of how people learn and develop. His research program has two major aims: firstly, to better understand the various factors (e.g., cognitive, neural, emotional, educational) that underlie and shape mathematics learning and performance; and secondly, to use this knowledge to design learning environments that most optimally promote mathematics learning and engagement.  

A major focus of Hawes’s research is spatial thinking (e.g., the visual-spatial imagination) and its role in learning and development, as well as its potential to increase access, opportunities, and interest in STEM.  

My plans for the Fellowship

As a Jacobs Fellow, my research program aims to better understand the role of spatial thinking in how people learn, do, and communicate mathematics. In general, individuals with stronger spatial skills—which involves the ability to generate, manipulate, and reason about spatial relations—are more likely to enter and excel in STEM, particularly in mathematics. Yet, spatial thinking remains an under-valued, under-recognized, and under-instructed aspect of mathematics education.  

A central question of my research is whether and how the teaching and learning of mathematics can be improved through ‘spatializing’ the curriculum; i.e., taking a more explicitly spatial approach to mathematics instruction. Relatedly, does such an approach make mathematics more engaging and accessible? 

To answer these and other related questions, my research team and I will design, implement, and test the effects of a novel mathematics intervention for elementary aged students. The intervention aims to enhance children’s mathematics learning through an instructional approach that better integrates research from the fields of spatial and numerical cognition.  

Ultimately, my research aims to test the hypothesis that attending to and developing students’ spatial thinking will lead to not only improvements in spatial thinking, but student interest, engagement, and performance in mathematics as well. 

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

The societal benefits of this research include a potential means for attracting a larger and more diverse range of students into spatially-demanding disciplines, including, but not limited to, the increasingly important and in-demand STEM domains. In terms of the international relevance, this study aims to highlight the importance of valuing spatial thinking in education. Indeed, a fundamental goal of this research is to test the theory that spatial thinking represents untapped potential, a hidden strength in students that can be drawn from and further cultivated to achieve new disciplinary insights, understanding, and appreciation of mathematics. In working towards this goal, I hope to demonstrate that one way of maximizing human potential is through providing more targeted spatial instruction and educational opportunities. 

From a more theoretical perspective, my research program aims to test and clarify the mechanisms underlying the well-established, but poorly understood, relationship between spatial and mathematical cognition. In doing so, we will obtain critical insights into the overarching question of when, why, and how spatial and mathematical cognition are linked. This research will help inform how to best leverage this relation in clinical and educational settings. 

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Rob is a quantitative sociologist who studies inequalities in educational outcomes and life trajectories in the global South. His research takes an explicitly global perspective, using cross-country comparative methods as well as in-depth case studies from low- and middle-income countries.  Recent projects look at school segregation in South Africa, the effect of private schools on learning outcomes, and the implications of Ghana’s Free Senior High School policy. 

My plans for the Fellowship

During my fellowship, I am planning to develop a harmonised dataset of educational indicators on more than 130 countries, derived from various international learning assessments. By merging this harmonized dataset with country-level macro-economic indicators and institutional characteristics of education systems, I will be able analyse the patterns, trends, and determinants of educational inequality around the world. For example, I will be able to provide internationally comparative evidence on the patterns and trends in learning inequality and between-school socio-economic segregation, identify the macro-level determinants of socio-economic inequalities in learning, and identify countries that combine high achievement with low inequalities in learning. I am also planning new collaborative projects using administrative data to study patterns of school segregation and their implications for inequality in India and Brazil. 

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives? 

Educational stratification—the structural inequality in educational resources and opportunities awarded to children from different socio-economic backgrounds—is a grave social injustice. The resulting inequality in learning outcomes hampers the life chances of marginalised children and lies at the root of the intergenerational transmission of poverty and deprivation. The patterns and determinants of learning inequality remain poorly understood, especially in the global South. 

My research agenda therefore seeks to develop the first longitudinal and global comparative analysis of learning inequality. It looks at the broader political economy of education systems and seeks to identify the ways in which education systems can inadvertently reproduce elite interests. At the same time, I am planning to study positive outliers—countries or regions that have achieved comparatively high levels of school integration—and use them as case studies for in-depth policy analysis. In doing so, I seek to provide evidence that is of direct relevance to international organizations and policymakers in the global South. 

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