Michelene Chi

Guiding Research Questions:

• How can we promote the highest level of engagement in classrooms to achieve the best learning outcomes? 
• Can particular processes in science class be presented from an emergent perspective to facilitate a better understanding?
• Can online videos achieve greater learning if they contain tutorial dialogues instead of lecture-style monologues? 

Current Research Projects:

One of Chi's research projects involves the devising and implementing of a professional development module for teachers to create lesson activities that facilitate certain modes of engagement behaviors in students that promote greater and deeper learning. The framework that her team provides is based on previous empirical work that demonstrates the success of designing activities that foster the types of engagement we identify. The end goal is that teachers can use the modules remotely to design activities within their lesson plans and tailor them to specific disciplines, such as courses in science. 

A second project is centered on addressing the misconceptions that arise out of teaching certain processes in science by following a sequential order as opposed to an emergent one. The theoretical framework contends that presenting particular processes under the lens of emergence helps students effectively understand causal explanations of emergent phenomena found in the natural world as well as in their science classes. The final goal is to create a stand-alone module that teaches the properties and causal explanations of emergence underlying science processes taught in the classrooms.  

A third project in Chi's lab examines the benefit of incorporating tutorial dialogues in online videos, compared to didactic lecture-type monologues. Chi and colleagues prior studies found an advantage in students’ learning when they watched dialogue-videos over monologue-videos, and they are attempting to replicate this result in a biology class at ASU.