Faculty & Staff
Co-Directors
Panayiota (Pani) Kendeou
Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Guy Bond Chair in Reading, Department of Educational Psychology
Pani develops and examines the efficacy of educational technologies to facilitate learning and assessment of processes and outcomes at scale. She is also exploring new approaches to reducing the impact of misinformation and developing digital media literacy.
Caitlin Mills
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology
Caitlin's research is at the intersection of cognitive psychology, computer science, and education. She is particularly interested in the antecedents and consequences of mind wandering, boredom, and engagement. Other interests include investigating affective states and task-unrelated thought in educational contexts, such as during complex learning from educational technologies.
Managing Director
Chris Steadman
PhD Student, Department of Educational Psychology, Psych Foundations
Chris focuses on the interplay between learning, memory, and attention. His current interests involve the use of naturally occurring data to detect and understand behavior in online learning environments.
Core Faculty
Laura Allen
Associate Professor and Bonnie Westby Huebner Chair, Department of Educational Psychology
Laura leverages theories and methodologies from cognitive science, learning science, linguistics, and education to examine the ways in which individuals learn and communicate through text and discourse. She is particularly interested in the use of computational linguistics approaches to glean theoretical insights into students’ learning processes as well as to develop and refine adaptive educational technologies.
David DeLiema
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology
David studies how moments of failure, playful experiences, embodied cognition, and epistemic cognition shape learning in computer science, family play outdoors, video games, and other STEM domains. Through research-practice partnerships, his research examines cognitive and psychological processes within the context of social interaction, and often takes place within technology-rich settings.
Xiaoran Sun
Assistant Professor, Department of Family Social Science
Xiaoran is interested in how the integration of different data types and methodological advances can further our understanding of family systems and adolescent development situated in larger social ecologies—including sociocultural and digital contexts. Specifically, she uses high-intensity smartphone data to study how digital technology may impact family dynamics and adolescent development, and leverages machine learning methods to make long-term predictions of adolescents' future achievement outcomes based on their early experiences.
Meixi
Assistant Professor, Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development
Meixi (she/they) designs learning at the edges of school, families, and lands towards Indigenous futures across Thailand, México and most recently Mní Sota Makoce. Meixi studies how land-based stories, Indigenous mobilities, and original and digital technologies can support human learning, becoming, and collective wellbeing alongside the rest of the living world.
Affiliate Faculty
Dongyeop Kang (DK)
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
DK develops human-centric language technologies. He also leads the Minnesota Natural Language Processing (NLP) group which develops interdisciplinary methods for NLP models based on theories in linguistics and cognitive/social sciences and builds interactive NLP systems for scientists, creative writers, and language learners.
Joseph A. Konstan
Distinguished McKnight Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Associate Dean for Research, College of Science and Engineering
Joseph's research addresses human-computer interaction issues, including personalizing the learning experience, on-line community information systems, computer systems to improve health, and ethics of online research.
Andrew Zieffler
Distinguished University Teaching Professor, Department of Educational Psychology
Andy's research interests are in the teaching and learning of statistics and data science. He is also interested in measurement and assessment as it relates to statistics education and data science research. A further interest of his is statistical computing and thinking about different ways to integrate computing into the statistics curriculum.