(she/her/hers)
Vanderbilt University
adaptive learning technologies, classroom orchestration, participatory design, K-12 STEM
Nicole Hutchins is a Research Scientist at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt in 2022. Leveraging her prior experience as a K-12 teacher, her work focuses on developing adaptive classroom technologies and teaching augmentation tools to better support our K-12 classroom teachers and engage all students in meaningful, technology-enhanced STEM learning.
Co-constructing teaching augmentation tools to support inclusive, meaningful learning in today's technology-enhanced, K-12 STEM classrooms
The modern classroom is increasingly changing. On the one hand, social and technological advancements have ushered in increased calls for designing inclusive educational opportunities that engage students in advanced STEM curricula, immersing students in constructivist learning opportunities that support technology-enhanced problem-solving and knowledge construction [2, 8]. Simultaneously, advancements in AI-based personalized learning approaches have increased our knowledge on student learning pathways, targeting students' individual needs and successes to allow for curricular adaptations. The combination of these directions poses a challenge - how might we balance our overriding social, constructivist orientations in education with the behaviorally-driven response systems that AI depends upon?
My research centers on researcher-practitioner infrastructuring of today's technology-enhanced classrooms for more equitable, sustainable integrations of real-world, problem-based learning curricula. My work leverages a value-sensitive, design-based research approach targeting the development of (1) novel, participatory design techniques that leverage diversified teacher feedback to co-construct explainable, actionable insight in support of reflective, responsive pedagogical approaches, and (2) technology-enhanced learning environments equipped with teaching augmentation tools to holistically engage classrooms in meaningful, technology-enhanced problem solving. This includes my recent work co-designing a learning analytics-based dashboard for teachers to help them reflect on students' computing and engineering design performance and learning behaviors in a lower and middle school earth science curriculum, and use the information to tailor their instruction to address and engage in students' successes and difficulties with curricular topics.
Addressing gaps in teacher-engaged participatory design provides for increased opportunities for software developers to more deeply construct an understanding of how behavioral-driven algorithmic results can inform constructivist pedagogical approaches, the dangers that may exist if our AI-backed software is misused, and how our designs promote equity in their applications. In addition, in working with a variety of perspectives, researcher-practitioner teams can better understand how we can collectively address bias in these curricular applications.
The aim is to move away from reactionary student support, to responsive support, leveling the playing field and making technology-enhanced, STEM learning more accessible for all students. At a high level, this may mean providing teaching augmentation tools that allow for socially-relevant curriculum customizations while still providing the teacher feedback to ensure students meet target learning objectives and standards. At an individual level, this may mean leveraging multi-modal learning analytics to better help a teacher understand the learning behaviors of neuro-diverse students to better reflect on the impact of multiple classroom infrastructures on that students' learning and how to meaningfully engage in their learning processes.