Research

My current projects include the design of a cognitive game to teach policy analysis, online diagramming tools for argumentation, developing curriculum and technology for young citizen journalists reporting on immigrant issues, and scaling service-learning organizations to teach engineers how to use their expertise to promote community development.

Policy Argument :: Policy World and iLogos

Informed and engaged citizens must be able to understand, analyze and argue about policy. 

Policy World is a game to teach students how to reason about public policy. It embeds an intelligent cognitive tutor in a game-like inquiry environment to make teaching policy deliberation both effective and fun. This game builds on a cognitive model of deliberation and several empirical studies on how students use evidence and causal diagrams.

iLogos is an argument mapping tool that you can use for teaching or research. iLogos is currently being used by Carnegie Mellon's introductory philosophy and english composition classes.

Civic communication :: Teaching citizen journalisms

Effective citizens must be to communicate policy issues to others to persuade them to act.  In a democracy, this means speaking, debating, and reporting.  In a pilot project funded by the McCormick Foundation we taught middle school students to create video profiles of the health issues of community members in Chicago’s Chinatown.

Recent publications

Easterday, M. W.  (to appear 2011).  Policy world: A cognitive game for teaching deliberation.  In N. Pinkwart & B. McLaren (Eds.), Educational technologies for teaching argumentation skills.  Oak Park, IL: Bentham Science Publishers.

[please email]

Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., Scheines, R., & Carver, S. M. (2011).  Using tutors to improve educational games.  In G. Biswas, S. Bull, J. Kay, & A. Mitrovic (Eds.), Artificial intelligence in education: Lecture notes in artificial intelligence 6738. (pp. 63-72).  Berlin: Springer.

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Easterday, M. W.  (2010).  An intelligent debater for teaching argumentation.  In V. Aleven, J. Kay, & J. Mostow (Eds.), Tenth international conference on intelligent tutoring systems. Pittsburgh, PA, USA, June 14-18, 2010.

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Aleven, V., Myers, E., Easterday, M. W., & Ogan, A.  (2010).  Toward a framework for the analysis and design of educational games.  In G. Biswas, D. Carr, Y. S. Chee, & W. Y. Hwang (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE international conference on digital game and intelligent toy enhanced learning. (pp. 69-76).  Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/DIGITEL.2010.55

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Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., Scheines, R., & Carver, S. M. (2009a).  Constructing causal diagrams to learn deliberation. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 19(4), 425-445.

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Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., Scheines, R., & Carver, S. M. (2009b). Will google destroy western democracy? Bias in policy problem solving. In V. Dimitrova, R. Mizoguchi, B. du Boulay, & A. Graesser (Eds.), Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications: Vol. 200. Proceeding of the 2009 conference on artificial intelligence in education: Building learning systems that care: From knowledge representation to affective modelling. (pp. 249-56). Amsterdam: IOS Press. doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-028-5-249

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Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., & Scheines, R.  (2007). 'Tis better to construct than to receive? The effects of diagram tools on causal reasoning. In R. Luckin, K. R. Koedinger, & J. Greer (Eds.), Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications: Vol. 158. Artificial intelligence in education: Building technology rich learning contexts that work. (pp. 93-100). Amsterdam: IOS Press.

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Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., & Scheines, R.  (2007).  The logic of babel: Causal reasoning from conflicting sources. In V. Aleven, K. Ashley, C. Lynch, & N. Pinkwart  (Eds.), Proceedings of the workshop on AIED applications in ill-defined domains at the 13th international conference on artificial intelligence in education. Marina del Rey, CA. (pp. 31-40).

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Scheines, R., Easterday, M. W., & Danks, D. (2007). Teaching the normative theory of causal reasoning. In A. Gopnik & L. Schultz (Eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation. (pp. 119-38). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

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