New NSF Award

We have an announcement about a new project funded by NSF! Becky Passonneau has a new 4-year NSF project on automated analysis of middle school students' STEM writing, as of 08/01/2020. This project is a collaboration among one of the leaders in the field of learning design, Sadhana Puntambekar, Becky Passonneau as a leader in the field of natural language processing technology applied to education, and ChanMin Kim (PSU, Education), a leader in the interface between learning design and educational technology.  The project will develop a collaborative "Writer's Notebook" for teaching middle school science, for use interactively in the classroom by students and teachers.  Scientific writing skills are an important part of communicating about science, and learning new science concepts. The Writers Notebook will be used in several middle schools in Wisconsin. The component piece of the Writers Notebook developed at PSU for analyzing students' written work will also be used in years 3 and 4 by middle school teachers in Pennsylvania public schools, through a partnership with PSU's Center for Science and the Schools (CSATS).  This is a high visibility project with the potential for very high impact.