Michelle Jordan
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Mail code: 5411Campus: Tempe
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Michelle E. Jordan's interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on peer interaction during the creative collaboration between students, students, and teachers, or members of work teams in formal and informal learning contexts. She examines how peers experience, express and manage uncertainty as they engage in collaborative problem-solving. Professor Jordan is particularly interested in the roles that sense-making and improvisation play in collaborative learning, with individuals and groups taking actions and making interpretations as they collectively design solutions to complex problems. Her scholarship is grounded in notions of learning as a social process, influenced by complexity theories, sociocultural theories, sociolinguistics, and the learning sciences.
Professor Jordan was the recipient of a ASU Knoweldge Exchange for Community Resilience Fellowship (2020) and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Outstanding Promising Research Scholar Award (2016). She is currently the Education Director of QESST, an National Science Foundation (NSF) Solar Engineering Research Center. She is researching how middle school students navigate communication challenges during collaborative engineering design projects. She and her eighth-grade science teacher colleague are using a design-based approach to investigate the role of a peer observer in helping team members increase awareness and improve how they negotiate peer interaction associated with the task and social aspects of engineering design.
- Ph.D., Educational Psychology (Learning, Cognition, and Motivation), University of Texas-Austin 2010. Dissertation: Managing Uncertainty through Peer Discourse during Collaborative Design Tasks.
- Master's degree. Music Education, Texas State University 2001
- Bachelor's degree. Music Education (honors), University of Colorado-Boulder 1993
