University of Maryland

Faculty Member, Human Development

Professor

Education

About

My laboratory (The Laboratory For scientific Thinking, Reasoning and Education) conducts research that spans the domains of  Education, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Educational Neuroscience (Neuroscience and education, brain and education, mind, brain, and education), and Cognitive Neuroscience. The overall focus of our research is to discover and foster the psychologically and educationally important mental processes underlying Thinking, Reasoning, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Conceptual change,  and Creativity, particularly in STEM fields. Our recent research using fNIRS, ERP, and fMRI has been on analogical reasoning, causal reasoning, and conceptual representations of scientific concepts. The goal of our work is to harness these findings in ways that facilitate the learning of concepts in science and facilitate their transfer into the real world. We use controlled laboratory experiments (standard cognitive research), real-world settings (science museums, molecular biology labs, and undergraduate biology labs), genetic analyses (DNA genotyping & DNA microarrays), and neuroimaging methods (fMRI, fNIRS, and ERP to investigate these issues.

As well as providing new models of the cognitive and neural processes underlying science (STEM fields), this work has many important practical implications involving insights into the ways that science is conducted, scientists are taught in schools and universities, and how industrial and academic laboratories are best structured to ensure success. The hallmark of our research is that we investigate higher-level cognition and Science education from multiple perspectives and use many different methodologies. The use of different converging methodologies makes it possible to propose models that are applicable across a wide variety of contexts and provide insights into the nature of what it means to be a sentient human being.

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