Christina Barbieri
University of Delaware, DE·Education Research
Students' mistakes on math problems reveal a lot about what they understand. Some errors are procedural slips in carrying out steps.
- Fields
Education Research
Psychology
Computer Science
- Topics
mathematics education
math learning
student errors
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Compile a database of math learning and outcome data from successful interventions in grades 4–10, covering more than 3,500 students and 700,000 work samples with detailed accuracy and strategy-error records.
- Develop AI-enabled assessment tools that analyze students' handwritten math responses, automatically identify the problem-solving strategy used, and diagnose errors in the solution process.
- Link the diagnosed strategies and errors to students' learning and motivation outcomes, and build user-friendly tools that help math teachers and education researchers use these data.
More about the research
Others point to gaps in understanding the underlying concepts. Telling these apart could help teachers respond. But reading through piles of handwritten work by hand is slow, which limits how much of this information teachers and researchers can use.
Why it matters
Math teachers in grades 4–10 could gain tools that automatically recognize the strategy a student used and pinpoint where it went wrong, making targeted help easier to give. Education researchers could reuse the shared dataset to study how errors relate to later learning and motivation. They could also use it to design and test new ways of teaching mathematics that support students' long-term success.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marcia A Barnes
Vanderbilt University, TN·Education Research
Test whether adding coordinated computerized working memory training to standard direct skills math instruction improves word-problem solving, arithmetic, and working memory beyond math instruction alone, in a randomized trial with first graders who have math delays and low working memory.
Sijia Zhang
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Computer Science
Develop teaching materials on planning, configuring and using cloud computing resources and frameworks such as Hadoop and federated learning for educational analytics tasks.
Kayce Mastrup
California State University-Monterey Bay, CA·Education Research
Prototype a bounded large language model homework tool for grades 3–5 that uses structured prompting constraints to guide students' reasoning on science and math problems rather than giving direct answers.
The school
University of Delaware: 22 labs on PI Pages, $466M a year on research, 298 research doctorates a year.
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