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Shaaron Ainsworth

Professor of Learning Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences

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Research Summary

My research interests are concerned with the development and evaluation of psychological theories of teaching and learning - broadly falling into the area of learning sciences.

I have two major foci for my work:

  1. Learning with Visual and Multiple Representations
  2. Technology Enhanced Learning particularly visual technologies, innovative approaches and theory development.

If you want to know more about Learning Sciences at Nottingham, please see our blog here

Selected Publications

I supervise PhD students in the area of Learning Sciences.I want to understand more about the cognitive, social and affective processes involved in learning and how we can use this knowledge to design better educational experiences. If you do too, please contact me.

In particular, I am interesting in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

Representational Learning How do people learn when they either construct or interpret representations (such as pictures, graphs, drawings, gestures, animations, etc). In particular, my current projects include:

  • Learning by drawing
  • Strategies in learning from text and pictures
  • Learning by translating between text and pictures

Technology Enhanced Learning. My interests here are not limited to specific type of technology or to a particular method. Instead I am interested in trying to understand how to design and use technologies to enhance learning. Recent and current project include:

  • Educational Games
  • Personal Inquiry Learning
  • Haptics
  • Gesture based Interfaces
  • Anonymity in classroom discussion
  • Emotion awareness in CSCL

All my work has a strong theoretical element

I do not research case studies of existing practices nor teachers and students' perceptions of learning technologies.

If you want to more about the sort of research students I supervise, see here for a list of current LSRI doctoral students and a description of what I look for in your research proposal.

University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5151
fax: +44 (0) 115 951 3666
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