LTC Receives National Science Foundation Grant - December 14, 2011

The National Science Foundation has awarded the Learning Technology Center (LTC) and its partners a $450,000 grant to carry out a one-year project, “Collaborative Research: An Agent-Based Simulation Environment for Predictive Longitudinal Modeling of High School Math Performance.”

The LTC, along with the University of California Santa Cruz, San Jose United School District (SJUSD), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will develop agent-based modeling techniques to create a simulated student environment. This will allow the creation of a model that can predict what happens to students when various agents related to math instruction, such as curricula, teaching techniques, or grading methods, are changed. SJUSD’s large data set on student performance will be used to verify the validity of the model. Variables in the teaching process will then be applied to the model to see if they improve student performance, giving researchers important insights into whether these agents can be applied to real-world classrooms with similar results.

The LTC’s role will be to represent the model and findings through visualization techniques, utilizing the visualization software and large data display of the LTC’s new Education Visualization Laboratory. For more information about the grant, contact Ken Tothero.

—Laurie Caldwell, LTC Communications Coordinator