Congratulations to Prashant Loyalka and Xavier Monroe as 2017 TELOS Grantees

May 22, 2017

Congratulations to Prashant Loyalka and Xavier Monroe as 2017 TELOS Grantees. The TELOS Grants program offers funding for research, teaching and/or design projects that address issues at the intersection of technology, equity and learning opportunities. Principal Investigators must be faculty or graduate students from the Stanford Graduate School of Education but collaborations are strongly encouraged with schools, community organizations, industry, and students, staff, and faculty from across the university. Their funded projects are:

Prashant Loyalka

Bringing Online Computer Assisted Learning to Rural Areas in China
We have proven in randomized trials that computer assisted learning (CAL) works. However, we have not proven why it works. TELOS funds will be used to develop and evaluate an online CAL package that is tailored to China’s national curriculum. Since we will have control of the delivery environment and the content of the software, we will be able to determine what mechanism best produces student gains when using CAL. We have thousands of CAL questions provided by the most trusted educational institutions in China and our software allows us to match questions to individual students. This unique capability to adapt learning material allows our software to determine which dynamics are most important to each student, and to respond by driving up exercises according to those parameters. This individualization is important in China’s fast-paced, rigid curriculum. In rural areas, where there is more danger of children falling behind their urban peers, remedial tutoring is often unavailable. Because of this, we want to move CAL forward and make it available and useful for millions of students in rural China to help close the gap.

Xavier Monroe

To determine if culturally responsive STEM learning activities during summer months can serve as interventions for underrepresented youth, I will investigate how culturally responsive interventions influence students’ participation and motivation related to STEM, and what key experiences and associated factors encourage student agency with respect to their learning and persistence in STEM. The TELOS-funded project will support me in offering a summer STEM opportunity for local middle school students, also explore whether students transfer acquired interests to their formal learning environment during the academic school year. The study will also build off work that considered how a group of urban elementary school instructors made sense of a new district STEAM policy (STEM with Arts included). This research aims to advance discovery and understanding by designing to transform student learning, training, and teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), particularly using Robotics Technology.