Joseph Jay Williams

The website for Joseph Jay Williams. I do research on improving online education as well as experimental research in cognitive science. Online Education Research Bridging laboratory research and actual practice has always been challenging, but online education presents an unprecedented context in which to do this. Carrying out experiments in the co... ntext of online education can support rigorous research, because it allows substantial experimental control - random assignment to conditions, precise specification of what is manipulated, and quantifiable measures of learning. At the same time, research that explores learning processes with an eye toward their enhancement possesses a great deal of ecological validity, and permits iterative improvement of online educational environments. Instead of doing lab experiments and then following a costly process to extend the results to a physical classroom, online education allows for in vivo studies: Experimental and control conditions are simply different instructional strategies, stimuli are educational materials students use every day, and dependent measures are formal assessments. Explanation & Learning Research Generating explanations has been shown to improve learning (e.g. Fonseca & Chi, 2011), and have great promise as a tool in online education. Instructors provide guidance through the questions they ask, while learners still construct the knowledge themselves, and learn even without feedback. Beyond educational settings, people constantly wonder "why?", such as why objects and people belong to certain categories or why others behave the way they do. Generating and evaluating explanations guides an individual's causal reasoning, categorization, and property induction, promotes learning and transfer in educational settings, and drives conceptual development in children.Read More