Stephanie Ann Siler PERSONAL INFORMATION Senior Research Scientist; Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University siler@andrew.cmu.edu Home Address Office Address 26 Cedricton Street 354 G Baker Hall Pittsburgh, PA 15210 Carnegie Mellon University (412) 559-5148 Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 268-6136 EDUCATION Bachelor of Science Physics, Pennsylvania State University, May 1991 Masters of Science Cognitive Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, May 1999 Doctorate of Philosophy Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, June, 2004 RESEARCH INTERESTS My overarching research interest is science learning. I am interested in how learning occurs in different settings, including one-on-one human-human tutoring, classroom learning, and learning from intelligent tutoring systems. Within human-human tutoring, I am interested in how it is adaptive to the particular learning needs of the student and have investigated the accuracy of tutors assessments of their students and their use of this information. More recently I have developed an interest in students motivation, and how this impacts learning in a classroom setting. RESEARCH EXPERIENCE Senior Research Scientist, Training in Experimental Design (TED) tutor project (9/06 present) In this project to transform what has been shown as effective one-to-one humandelivered instruction in evaluating and designing informative experiments into teacherassisted computerized instruction, I have been involved in numerous aspects of this project, including training teachers to deliver instruction in the classroom, development of assessment materials, development of instructional materials, analyses and assessment of student learning results from instruction, providing remedial tutoring to students who did not learn adequately from instruction and analyzing these tutoring sessions for ways to improve classroom instruction. Postdoctoral Researcher, Lesson Planning Project (8/04 8/06) Work on this project includes developing and analyzing results of formative assessments and motivational questionnaires given to students in classrooms, communicating results to teachers, interviewing students for more detailed information for formative use, classroom observations. Led 3-day teacher workshop (Summer 2005), in which plans for the following academic year were outlined and discussed.
Dissertation research (2/02 6/04) I designed, developed materials for, and ran my dissertation study, which investigated the effects of novice tutors experience with a specific student on their assessments of their student (including their general abilities, specific content knowledge, and motivational beliefs) on their tutoring actions, and on outcome measures (tutoring efficiency, student learning, and motivation). I presented my findings on tutor assessment accuracies in [7]. WHY project (qualitative natural language physics tutor) (1/02 8/02) KCD evaluation (2/02 5/02). I designed, ran, and evaluated the results of a study that directly compared student learning of physics concepts from interactive KCDs, to their learning of the same concepts from (non-interactive) text lessons. This study is summarized in [6]. Why evaluation (2/02 5/02). I developed the assessment materials for and helped run a multi-site evaluation comparing student learning from WHY tutoring system to learning from computer-mediated human tutoring, AutoTutor (another qualitative tutoring system developed by Art Graesser s group at the University of Memphis), and reading the physics lessons. Research technician, Omni Corporation (May 1 24, 2000) Job duties included administering cognitive tests (including CVLT, AMNART, Digit Symbol, and Trailmaking) to air traffic controllers for a study on the effects of shift work on cognitive performance. Andes project (9/97 12/01) My primary responsibility was user-testing Andes, a quantitative physics tutoring system developed by Kurt VanLehn and his group at the University of Pittsburgh, in preparation for system evaluations. Andes/Atlas evaluation (6/00 3/01) I was involved in designing, developing assessment materials (i.e., tests, learning task materials), then ran and analyzed data for an experiment comparing student learning from Andes, which gave brief text-only hints to students following their errors to learning from Andes supplemented with interactive knowledge construction dialogs (KCDs) that were given to students following their errors (Atlas). This study is summarized in [5]. Andes2/Atlas evaluation (9/01 12/01) I was involved in designing, developing assessment materials for, running and analyzing student outcome measures for an evaluation comparing student learning from Andes2, which addressed student errors with non-interactive messages to student learning from Andes2, which addressed student errors with interactive KCDs that included the same conceptual content as the messages. Master s project (6/96 11/98) I investigated the question of whether conceptual change in middle-school students knowledge of science concepts can be promoted by teaching a reasoning strategy. Physics tutoring project (9/96 8/97) I investigated the tutoring actions and events associated with college students learning of physics when tutored by expert physics tutors. The results these analyses are included in [3 & 4].
Human tutoring project (9/94 8/96) Investigated tutoring actions associated with middle school student learning of a biology concept (the human circulatory system) in both natural one-to-one human tutoring and tutoring in which tutors explanations were suppressed. I aided in designing the study, and ran the study on my own, which involved recruiting participants, interviewing, and testing subjects. After the study was completed, I coded the verbal protocols and performed most of the data analyses. The results of these analyses are included in [1 & 2]. TEACHING EXPERIENCE Research Methods Laboratory (Spring 2000, Spring 2003, Fall 2003, & Spring 2004) Duties included instructing (topics included APA format, experimental design, ethics in research, statistics, etc.), and guiding students in the processes of developing studies, collecting data, analyzing the data, writing papers, and presenting their research. Cognitive Psychology Laboratory (Fall 1999 & Fall 2002) Duties included instructing on topics in cognitive psychology, helping students run experiments (using MEL Lab software), preparing and administering tests, and guiding students in the processes of writing and revising research papers. PUBLICATIONS Siler, S. A & VanLehn, K. (Accepted). Comparison of student learning and motivational outcomes in synchronous computer-mediated and face-to-face one-to-one tutoring. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. Siler, S. A., Klahr, D., Cary, M., Magaro, C., & Willows, K. (In preparation). Preconceptions and misconceptions in experimental design. Siler, S. A. & VanLehn, K. (In preparation). The effect of shared experience on one-on-one tutoring outcomes. Li, J., Klahr, D. & Siler, S. A. (2006). What Lies Beneath Standards Alignment and Science Achievement Gap? A Blueprint for Managing Content Standards, Accountability Tests, and Everyday Instruction. Science Educator, 15-1. Chi, M. T. H., Siler, S. A., & Jeong, H. (2004). Can tutors monitor their students understanding accurately? Cognition and Instruction, 22(3), 363-387. Siler, S. A. & VanLehn, K. (2003). Accuracy of Tutors Assessments of their Students by Tutoring Context. In R. Alterman & D. Hirsch, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [7] Rosé, C., Bhembe, D., Siler, S., Srivastava, R., & VanLehn, K. (2003). Exploring the Effectiveness of Knowledge Construction Dialogues, Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence in Education 2003, Sidney, Australia. Rosé, C., Bhembe, D., Siler, S., Srivastava, R., & VanLehn, K. (2003). The Role of Why Questions in Effective Human Tutoring, Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence in Education 2003, Sidney, Australia. VanLehn, K., Siler, S. A., Murray, C., Yamauchi, T., & Baggett, W. B. (2003) Why do only some events cause learning during human tutoring? Cognition and Instruction, 21(3), 209-249. [4] Siler, S. A., Rosé, C., Frost, T., VanLehn, K. & Koehler (2002). Evaluating knowledge construction dialogs (KCDs) versus minilessons within Andes2 and alone, ITS2002 Workshop on Empirical Methods for Tutorial Dialogue Systems (pp. 9-15), San Sebastian, Spain. [6] VanLehn, K., Jordan, P., Rosé, C. P., Bhembe, D., Bottner, M., Gaydos, A., Makatchev, M., Pappuswamy, U., Ringenberg, M., Roque, A., Siler, S., & Srivastava, R. (2002). The architecture of Why2-Atlas: A coach for qualitative physics essay writing. In S. A. Cerri, G.
Gouarderes, & F. Paraguacu (Eds.), Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 2002, 6 th International Conference (pp. 158 167). Rosé, C. P., Bhembe, D., Roque, A., Siler, S. A., Srivastava, R., & VanLehn, K. (2002). A Hybrid Language Understanding Approach for Robust Selection of Tutoring Goals. In S. A. Cerri, G. Gouarderes, & F. Paraguacu (Eds.), Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 2002, 6 th International Conference (pp. 552 561). Jordan, P. & Siler, S. A. (2002). Student Initiative and Questioning Strategies in Computer- Mediated Human Tutoring Dialogs, ITS2002 Workshop on Empirical Methods for Tutorial Dialogue Systems, San Sebastian, Spain. Rosé, C. P., Jordan, P., Ringenberg, M., Siler, S. A., VanLehn, K., & Weinstein, A., (2001), Interactive conceptual tutoring in Atlas-Andes, In J. D. Moore, C. L. Redfield & W. L. Johnson (Eds.). AI in Education: AI-ED in the Wired and Wireless Future (pp. 256-266). Amsterdam: IOS Press. Winner of the 2001 Second Best Paper Award. [5] Chi, M. T. H., Siler, S. A., Jeong, H., Yamauchi, T., & Hausmann, R. G. (2001) Learning from human tutoring. Cognitive Science, 25, 471-533. [1] Rosé, C., Freedman, R., Jordan, P., Ringenberg, M., Roque, A., Schulze, K., Shelby, R., Siler, S. A., Treacy, D., VanLehn, K., Weinstein, A., & Wintersgill, M. (2000). Conceptual Tutoring in Atlas-Andes. In Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications: Papers from the 2000 Fall Symposium (North Falmouth, MA), demo session. AAAI Technical Report FS-00-01. VanLehn, K., Siler, S. A., Murray, C., & Baggett, W.B. (1998). What makes a tutorial event effective? In M. A. Gernsbacher & S. J. Derry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp 1084-1089). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [3] VanLehn, K., Niu, Z., Siler, S. A., & Gertner, A. (1998). Student modeling from conventional test data: A Bayesian approach without priors. In Proceedings of the 4 th ITS 98 Conference (pp. 434-443). Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. Jeong, H., Siler, S. A., & Chi, M. T. H. (1997). Can tutors diagnose students understanding? In M. G. Shafto & P. Langley (Eds.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 959). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [2] CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS Cary, M. S., Siler, S. A., Magaro, C. & Klahr, D. (2007). Training in experimental design (TED): Developing scalable and adaptive computer-based science instruction. Poster presented at 2007 IES Research Conference, Washington, D.C. Klahr, D., Li, J., Strand Cary, M., Siler, S., & Triona, L. (2007). The importance of defining before maligning. Talk given at the 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Conference, San Francisco, California. Siler, S. A. & Li, J. (2006). African-American late-elementary-school students: Can their motivational patterns be explained by Dweck and Leggett s model of motivation? Poster session presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 2005, San Francisco, California. Siler, S. A. & Li, J. (2006). Stereotype threat: Does it hurt the science achievement test performance of African-American and female 6 th -graders? Poster session presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 2005, San Francisco, California. Klahr, D., Strand Cary, M., Li, J. & Siler, S. A. (2005) Traversing the interface between basic research and the classroom in elementary science instruction. Talk given at the Cognitive Development Society Conference, San Diego, California. Siler, S. A. & Chi, M. (2000). Collaboration during error remediation. Talk given at the annual University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Graduate Student conference.
Chi, M. T. H., Siler, S. A., Ferrari, M., & Slotta, J. D. (1999). Why Students Fail to Learn Concepts of Complexity. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 1999, Montreal, Canada. Siler, S. A. & Chi, M. T. H. (1998). Revising knowledge representation in one-to-one tutoring. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 1998, San Diego, California. Siler, S. A. (1998). Knowledge integration when learning Complex processes. Talk given at the annual University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Graduate Student conference. AWARDS Tim Post Award for Best Paper (Master s thesis), Failing to Understand Emergent Processes, June 2000. Semi-finalist, Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Award, March 2001. Second best paper award for Interactive Conceptual Tutoring in Atlas-Andes, presented at Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference, 2001. ACTIVITIES Cognitive Brown Bag organizer, Spring terms, 1995 & 2000. Student representative for Cognitive Program, Summer 1999. Co-organizer of University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon University graduate student conference at CMU, July 1998. OTHER JOB EXPERIENCE Engineer/Project Manager, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock, MD, 1991-1993. Program Assistant (Ms. Wiz Science and Technology Camp), Pennsylvania State University and National Science Foundation, State College, PA, 1991. Physics Tutor, Pennsylvania State University's Learning Center, State College, Pennsylvania, 1991. ORGANIZATIONS American Psychological Society. Cognitive Science Society. American Educational Research Association References Made Available Upon Request