Ogan Will Use NSF Grant To Study Intercultural Communication in the Classroom
News
International teaching assistants often struggle to find success in their teaching and research careers because of communication breakdowns in the classroom. Reducing such breakdowns would not only help TAs, though. It would also bolster the quality of undergraduate education — improving recitation sessions and one-on-one meetings. And since TAs are highly used in STEM fields, helping TAs bridge the communication divide could have a lasting impact on STEM education as a whole.
HCII Assistant Professor Amy Ogan hopes to create that lasting impact with her National Science Foundation-funded project, "Cyberlearning: Teaching Intercultural Competence Through Personal Informatics." Supported by the NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII), the two-year, $174,000 grant will allow Ogan to investigate how technology can help STEM teaching assistants, especially foreign teaching assistants, better communicate with their students across cultural lines.
The project's main focus is building software called CANAR (Computer-Aided Noticing and Reflection), a system of smart sensors that will detect speech in the classroom and provide feedback to the instructor in real time via a mobile app. Over time, Ogan and her team hope to use the software and the information it gathers to address questions about what data and strategies can support intercultural noticing and reflection among the TAs, and to examine how this reflection benefits their intercultural communication competencies in the classroom. The ultimate goal is to support improved STEM teaching and learning in university classrooms by bridging cultural divides between students and their teachers.
"Many people think that education will be transformed by collecting enormous amounts of data from online classes," Ogan said. "We think that what happens in the physical classroom is even more valuable, and in the near future will be just as achievable to help build technologies that support better learning and instruction."
Ogan is part of the first cohort of faculty members across the country to benefit from the CRII, which began awarding grants this year. The program encourages research independence by supporting untenured faculty or research in the first two to five years after they complete their Ph.D., and providing them with an opportunity to recruit and mentor their first graduate students.
Read more about Ogan's project on the NSF website.