The following outlets have written about the work I've been doing toward my dissertation. 

(Click each image to see their article)

David Gerritsen (that's me) is a learning scientist trained in Human-Computer Interaction, User-Centered Design, Cognitive & Learning Sciences, Educational Technology, Personal Informatics, Instructional Development, and related fields.

I have recently joined the non-profit sector as a new addition to the stellar team at ETS's AI Research Lab. My title is Associate Impact Research Scientist, and my work involves scaling up personalized learning systems through efficacy research.

Until recently I was a Research Associate at the Eberly Center in Carnegie Mellon University. My work involved helping to design, test, and implement technologies that support learning and teaching in college classrooms. Beyond conducting my own research into multimodal learning analytics, I am also responsible for supporting faculty in leading their own action research agendas.

I was a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at CMU.

I was also a fellow in the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER). That's a group of PhD students who align their various methodological interests in order to build creative and rigorous education research. Most of this work is in grades K – 12, but the majority of work I do happens to involve university students.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is generally thought of as the academic and practical intersection of design, psychology, and computer science. I come mostly from a behavioral science background, and I try to apply social frameworks to improve what we understand about how people learn to teach, and then design technologies around those discoveries.

Some of the questions that I have investigated include

• What aspects of human observation of teaching are most critical for helping instructors improve? And are there sensors or analytics that can support those existing features?
• Are there aspects of technology enhanced teaching observation that can do things that are not currently possible for human observers to do?
• In what ways do instructors learn best when using interactive feedback?
• How do instructors learn to ask their students productive, thought-provoking questions?
• How can technology help to increase student engagement and participation in class?
• What do K – 12 teachers know about their students' reasoning, and how do they use it to orchestrate class discussion?
• How can we use computers to make professional development for teachers more personal, efficient, and fun?

I use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods. I'm particularly fond of design-based research, live observations of classrooms, interviews and surveys, video/audio analysis, and sensor data.

My dissertation work involved envisioning a socio-technical system to gather background information (like speech, sound, motion, etc.) and correlating it to meaningful events in the classroom. From these data I created visualizations and training modules to give people new perspectives on their behaviors, new insight on their environment, and a wider array of strategies to get them through pedagogical challenges. This research helped to surface how beliefs and attitudes about learning may influence the pedagogical development of university-level teaching assistants.

If you want to talk, gmail is easiest: davidalso.

_{Updated: September 14, 2021}