About
The Education and Brain Science Research Lab is beginning the Student Teacher Interaction Analytic (STiA) project to determine the relationship between executive function language used by teachers during reading instruction and reading outcomes. Executive function (EF) is a set of cognitive controls that support us in planning, monitoring, and executing our behaviors and actions throughout the day and has been referred to as the air traffic control center of the brain. Inhibiting actions, planning and organizing, sustaining attention, shifting attention and monitoring behavior are all examples of executive function. EF is highly correlated with reading outcomes but is difficult to train. We want to find out if the language used in teacher student interactions during reading instruction improves EF and/or reading.
We are planning to train a model on executive function language used in the classroom with a specific focus on reading instruction. Our goal is for the model to be able to categorize EF language by type (e.g., monitoring vs inhibiting) and its context (e.g., general classroom management vs reading specific behavior). Participating students would help build and train the model and have opportunities to help us broaden our vision of how transformer models could help our project have more efficient, adaptable data processing.
Contact
Learn more about our lab’s research here: https://ebrl.vkcsites.org/ If you have questions about the project or are interested in working with us, email natalie.huerta@vanderbilt.edu.