Join us for an insightful talk by Prof. Dr. Martina Rau, Full Professor of Research on Learning and Instruction at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich.
Visual representations play an important role in MINT learning. They are intuitive and thought to facilitate learning. However, students often misinterpret visualizations, and – in part because they seem so intuitive – both students and instructors remain unaware of these difficulties.
Professor Martina Rau’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to addressing this issue. Trained in educational psychology and human-computer interaction, she combines controlled experiments with user-centered studies to investigate how instruction can use visualizations productively.
In doing so, she has been collaborating with professors and instructors in domains such as chemistry and engineering to align her interventions with disciplinary practices.
Further, in collaboration with computer scientists, her projects have used machine-learning methods to improve instructional interventions beyond what a human teacher could achieve.
Besides presenting effective ways of using visualizations in instruction, Professor Martina Rau will reflect on the merits of interdisciplinary research collaborations.