The EEGLAB News #15
Yu-Shuang Liu, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Educational Psychology, University of Connecticut
Yu-Shuang Liu, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. She is part of the Lab-to-Classroom research group at UConn’s Neag School of Education. Dr. Liu’s current research involves student learning. There is a dilemma in the field of Education – some feel that too much assistance may not always lead to better outcomes. In her study, students will interact with an online tutor, learning a topic in the field of chemistry. “We are trying to determine how engaged or disengaged students are during the process,” Dr. Liu clarifies. The tutor to which she refers is actually an ‘intelligent tutor’ (computer system) that provides feedback depending on where a student clicks on the screen.
Dr. Liu plans to collect data from 120 high school students, across two studies under the same project. One of the projects will be performed by a collaborator in Israel who will be collecting data there, so that they can compare the data. “Students will be interacting with the tutors and we will record their EEG, skin conductance and heart rate. We use an alpha power to study disengagement. We will also use eye-tracking to study their fixation/gaze and how they interact with the tutor. We will have pre-test and post-test to see how the tutor helps.” Dr. Liu is excited about what her project might show. She adds enthusiastically, “This will be the first time using this online tutor while recording EEG and eye tracking, to measure students’ level of engagement!”