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Learning Research and
Development Center

Message from LRDC Director Charles Perfetti


The Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) is home to multidisciplinary research on human learning and education. Our research spans a wide range from the neural bases of learning and memory, through literacy, language, reasoning, and STEM learning, the social and developmental contexts that affect educational attainment and equity, and to large scale efforts for educational improvement. We are pleased to share some our research with the University of Pittsburgh community and the wider learning and educational sciences communities through these occasional reports of the LRDC Research News, prepared by Elizabeth Rangel, LRDC Director of Communications.

September 2022

 
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Museums and Community-based Organizations Support Family Literacy


While many people live nearby museums, not enough people fully utilize their potential as resources for growth and learning. Karen Knutson and Kevin Crowley, co-leads of LRDC's UPCLOSE project, examined how museums can connect to collective impact efforts in literacy and how informal learning programs can be reoriented to better respond to community needs. Read the full article on our website here.

 A young girl lays on her stomach on a bench in a museum. She is wearing a red skirt and a pink top with black shoes. The girl is writing or drawing in a journal and is surrounded by paintings.

Understanding Gender, Mindset and Performance in Physics


Improving the diversity in STEM education has been a long-standing focus of policymakers and researchers. PhD candidate Alysa Malespina, LRDC Senior Scientist, Christian Schunn;  and dB-SERC Director, Chandralekha Singh studied students' intelligence mindset in an introductory physics class to investigate if their mindset views were separable into nuanced dimensions, if they varied by gender/sex and over time, and if they predicted course grade. Read the full article on our website here.

 A blonde teenager wearing a mauve top, jeans, and a backpack is smiling and standing in front of a whiteboard of physics equations.

A Measure of Individual Differences in Readers’ Approaches to Text 


Readers have different motivations and approaches to text that cover a range of topics and difficulty levels. Regina Calloway, LRDC PhD; Anne Helder, Leiden University; and Charles Perfetti, LRDC Director, developed The Readers’ Approaches to Test Questionnaire (TReAT-Q) to examine how readers’ approaches to text are linked to reading comprehension. Read the full article on our website here. 

 A Pitt student with short blonde hair is seated in the cathedral of learning at a table. She is reading a book and wearing a mask and a blue Pitt sweatshirt.
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A stock photo of a young black woman with tight, short curls sits outside on steps in jeans and a jacket. She is working on her laptop.

Wang and Del Toro's Research Attracts National Media Attention

Their article "Online Racism and Mental Health among Black American Adolescents in 2020" has been covered by the Huffington Post, Pittwire, and The Journal for Blacks in Higher Education.
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LRDC Researchers win Learning Engineering Tools Competition

Diane Litman, Lindsay Clare Matsumura, and Rip Correnti were among the 2021-2022 awardees of the Learning Engineering Tools Competition Catalyst Prize. The team received the award to create the web-based application "Automated Assessment of Classroom Discussion Quality," that will use natural language processing and machine learning methods to analyze classroom discussion quality. Read more here. 
The logo for the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC). "CNBC" is in bold caps lock yellow text.

Pittsburgh’s ‘Neighborly Playground’ for Neuroscience has New Leadership

LRDC's Julie Fiez and Lori Holt, CMU, will co-lead the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a 28-year-old neuroscience research and education neuroscience powerhouse, into its next era. Read more here in Pittwire.

Recent Publications


Villata, S., Araszkiewicz, M., Ashley, K. et al. (2022) Thirty years of artificial intelligence and law: the third decade. Artif Intell Law.

Bachman, H.J., Miller, P., Elliott, L., Duong, S., Libertus, M., & Votruba Drzal, E. (2022) Associations among socioeconomic status and preschool-aged children’s, number skills, and spatial skills: The role of executive function. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Del Toro, J., & Wang, M.T. (2022). Online racism and mental health among Black American adolescents in 2020. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Grund, A., Galla, B.M., & Fries, S. (2022) Achievement motivation in students' everyday lives: Its relationship to momentary positive and negative activation and the moderating role of mindfulness. Learning and Individual Differences.

DeVlieger, S.E., Colvin, S., Akiva, T., & Galla, B.M. (2022). Adolescents’ experiences of distress and well-being during intensive mindfulness practice: A mixed-methods study. PsyArXiv.

Sequeira, S.L., Forbes, E.E., Hanson, J.L., & Silk, J.S. (2022) Positive valence systems in youth anxiety development: A scoping review. Journal of Anxiety Disorders.

Tran, N., Alikhani, M., & Litman, D. (2022) How to ask for donations? Learning user-specific persuasive dialogue policies through online interactions. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization.

Litman, D., Afrin, T., Kashefi, O., Olshefski, C., Godley, A., Hwa, R. (2022). An automated writing evaluation system for supporting self-monitored revising. In: Rodrigo, M.M., Matsuda, N., Cristea, A.I., Dimitrova, V. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13355. Springer, Cham.

Steele, C., Lobczowski, N., Davison, T., Yu, M., Diamond, M., Kovashka, A., Litman, D., Nokes-Malach, T., & Walker, E. (2022). It takes two: Examining the effects of collaborative teaching of a robot learner. In: Rodrigo, M.M., Matsuda, N., Cristea, A.I., Dimitrova, V. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners’ and Doctoral Consortium. AIED 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13356. Springer, Cham.

Perfetti, C., & Helder, A. (2022). "Progress in reading science." The Science of Reading: A Handbook, Second Edition. John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Tumminia, M.J., DeVlieger, S.E., Colvin, S., Akiva, T., & Galla, B.M. (2022). Adolescents’ experiences of distress and well-being during intensive mindfulness practice: A mixed-methods study.  Mindfulness.
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