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Victor Lee

Stanford University, Graduate School of Education, Faculty Member

Utah State University, Instructional Technology & Learning Sciences, Faculty Member

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Papers by Victor Lee

Bite-sized Learning for Teachers through the Montage Platform

General Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2022

The Montage platform is a new digital environment that we are developing as part of an ongoing re... more The Montage platform is a new digital environment that we are developing as part of an ongoing research-practice partnership with a school district that seeks to encourage teachers to pursue new forms of technology-mediated pedagogy and better retain institutional knowledge given teacher turnover. In Montage, the interface and features are designed to support "bite-sized" teacher learning through exposure to user generated content. This paper describes the current version of the platform, its design inspiration, relevant theory, features, and four deliberate strategies used to embed bite-sized teacher learning supports.

Aggregated Annotation of Noticing in Video through Frame

General Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2022

Video is recognized in learning sciences as a valuable medium for motivating and supporting pract... more Video is recognized in learning sciences as a valuable medium for motivating and supporting practices of 'noticing' key events in complex interactions. Various approaches to support development of noticing have included in-person group discussions and threaded text linked to time segments in a given video. This paper reports on an initial effort to use aggregate representation of time-stamped text annotations across users as a way of supporting university teaching activities. The imagined use cases are courses where there are a dozen or more students who can identify and annotate specific moments they notice in video. The aggregated representation can then provide feedback for the entire class about where everyone is noticing key events and can help anchor discussion around the video and the content that video is helping students to explore.

Data science education across the disciplines: Underexamined opportunities for K-12 innovation

British Journal of Educational Technology, 2022

Data science is often described as the integration of computational and digital technologies, sta... more Data science is often described as the integration of computational and digital technologies, statistical and mathematical knowledge, and disciplinary expertise. It is a rapidly growing methodological approach for educational practice (Estrellado et al., 2020) and research (McFarland et al., 2021) and as a topic of study at the collegiate level (National Academies of Science, Engineering, & Medicine, 2018). Recently, aggressive efforts have begun in many places to promote data science as a topic for students to study as part of primary and secondary education. 1 Yet, despite calls to support data science learning opportunities for younger-aged learners, it is still unclear what should constitute a data science education for these grade levels and how data science would be integrated into already densely-packed curricula. There are some natural affinities between pre-collegiate data science education and mathematics or computer science education. This is an approach that has been explored in recent years that has led to novel and noteworthy programs and curricula (eg, Gould et al., 2018; Krishnamurthi et al., 2020). While we remain interested in and receptive to the expansion and continued refinement of standalone courses, papers in this special issue demonstrate that now is the time to not only explore how data science education might take shape within such courses, but also across K-12 disciplines-for example, in social studies, science and even art education settings.

Bite-sized Learning for Teachers through the Montage Platform

by Victor Lee, Robert Daniel Wachtel Pronovost, and Kaifeng Cheng

General Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences 2022, 2022

The Montage platform is a new digital environment that we are developing as part of an ongoing re... more The Montage platform is a new digital environment that we are developing as part of an ongoing research-practice partnership with a school district that seeks to encourage teachers to pursue new forms of technology-mediated pedagogy and better retain institutional knowledge given teacher turnover. In Montage, the interface and features are designed to support "bite-sized" teacher learning through exposure to user generated content. This paper describes the current version of the platform, its design inspiration, relevant theory, features, and four deliberate strategies used to embed bite-sized teacher learning supports.

"Design for Co-Design" in a Computer Science Curriculum Research-Practice Partnership

Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2022, 2022

This paper reports on a study of the dynamics of a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) oriented a... more This paper reports on a study of the dynamics of a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) oriented around design, specifically the co-design model. The RPP is focused on supporting elementary school computer science (CS) instruction by involving paraprofessional educators and teachers in curricular co-design. A problem of practice addressed is that few elementary educators have backgrounds in teaching CS and have limited available instructional time and budget for CS. The co-design strategy entailed highlighting CS concepts in the mathematics curriculum during classroom instruction and designing computer lab lessons that explored related ideas through programming. Analyses focused on tensions within RPP interaction dynamics and how they were accommodated when RPP partners were designing for co-design activities, a critical component that leads to curricular co-design itself. We illustrate these tensions with examples of clusters of activity that appeared repeatedly among the research and practice team members when "designing for co-design".

Aggregated Annotation of Noticing in Video through Frame

by Victor Lee, Joshua Weiss, and Jonathan Lai

General Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences 2022, 2022

Video is recognized in learning sciences as a valuable medium for motivating and supporting pract... more Video is recognized in learning sciences as a valuable medium for motivating and supporting practices of 'noticing' key events in complex interactions. Various approaches to support development of noticing have included in-person group discussions and threaded text linked to time segments in a given video. This paper reports on an initial effort to use aggregate representation of time-stamped text annotations across users as a way of supporting university teaching activities. The imagined use cases are courses where there are a dozen or more students who can identify and annotate specific moments they notice in video. The aggregated representation can then provide feedback for the entire class about where everyone is noticing key events and can help anchor discussion around the video and the content that video is helping students to explore.

Cultivating Critical, Justice-Oriented Data Literacies in a Post-Truth World

by Victor Lee, Daniel Pimentel, Emily Reigh, Andee Rubin, Susan Yoon, and Thomas Richman

What are pathways toward critical and just data literacies? Achieving critical and just data lite... more What are pathways toward critical and just data literacies? Achieving critical and just data literacies is especially challenging in an ideologically polarizing "post-truth" world in which we confront a rising tide of misinformation and fake news, alongside discourse that denigrates politically conservative perspectives. Although reasoning with data is rooted in epistemic processes, the stances people take are-and should be-influenced by values, concerns about maintaining cultural group membership, and concerns about equity and justice. Through a range of approaches, contexts, and age groups, the papers seek to illuminate how to help learners become adept at employing data interpretation conventions, scrutinizing the reliability of data representations, and examining whether data representations render humans and more-than-humans visible or invisible, central, peripheral, unidimensional, or complex. Jointly, the papers examine how to cultivate publics who make use of consequential data representations to negotiate their everyday lives, and who identify and resist datafied injustice.

"With statistics, that's supposed to take bias away": Divergent teacher views on engaging students with race in data sets

Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2022, 2022

This study examined what pedagogical potential teachers see in data sets that include race as a v... more This study examined what pedagogical potential teachers see in data sets that include race as a variable. Through interviews with 11 secondary teachers, we show a range of views about the role race plays with respect to students' opportunities to engage with data analysis. From analysis of teachers' noticings of pedagogical potential and justifications for what data sets they would prefer in a constrained choice task, we identify areas where the learning sciences can support teacher learning and curriculum design with race-inclusive data sets. Methods

Framing in cognitive clinical interviews about intuitive science knowledge: Dynamic student understandings of the discourse interaction

Science Education, 2012

Researchers in the science education community make extensive use of cognitive clinical interview... more Researchers in the science education community make extensive use of cognitive clinical interviews as windows into student knowledge and thinking. Despite our familiarity with the interviews, there has been very limited research addressing the ways that students understand these interactions. In this work we examine students' behaviors and speech patterns in a set of clinical interviews about chemistry for evidence of their tacit understandings and underlying expectations about the activity in which they are engaged. We draw on the construct of framing from anthropology and sociolinguistics and identify clusters of behaviors that indicate that students may alternatively frame the interview as Inquiry, an Oral Examination, or an Expert Interview. We present two examples of students shifting between frames during the course of individual interviews. By examining the surrounding interaction we identify both conceptual and epistemological interviewer cues that facilitate and constrain frame shifts. We discuss the implications of dynamic student framing, that is identifiable in student behaviors and discourse, for researchers who use clinical interviews to map student's intuitive science knowledge.

How to study learning processes? Reflection on methods for fine-grain data analysis

Proceedings of the …, Jun 24, 2008

Abstract: This symposium addresses methodological issues in studying children's knowledge an... more Abstract: This symposium addresses methodological issues in studying children's knowledge and learning processes. The class of methods discussed here looks at processes of learning in fine-grained detail, through which a theoretical framework evolves rather than is merely applied. This class of methodological orientations to studying learning processes diverges from more common ones in several important ways: 1) Attention to diverse features of the learning interaction; 2) conducting a moment-by-moment analysis, ...

More Than Just Plain Old Technology Adoption Understanding Variations in Teachers Use of an Online Planning Tool

Springer US, May 1, 2021

This paper examines variability in teachers' usage patterns as they interacted with an online tea... more This paper examines variability in teachers' usage patterns as they interacted with an online teacher support tool, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS), as part of their professional work. The CCS is a web application that supports teachers in planning, adapting, sequencing, and enacting differentiated instruction in Earth science education. By mining the usage log files of over 40 teachers who used the CCS over a yearlong period, we analyzed for variability using a framework developed in marketing research to characterize appropriation of technology. This analysis helped reveal different kinds of teachers' patterns along two dimensions: frequency and variability of use. We then turned to qualitative records o f teachers' experiences during the year to better understand why those variations appeared. Focusing on the experiences of several teachers, we distilled "contextual contingencies" that influenced how they chose to appropriate and use the CCS.

Moving ahead in the study of STEM interests and interest development: A new research agenda

We seek to jumpstart a program whose long-term goal is to advance a more nuanced and encompassing... more We seek to jumpstart a program whose long-term goal is to advance a more nuanced and encompassing understanding of STEM interests by comparing and contrasting how they are manifested across settings of STEM practice. People can and do get interested in STEM-based activities in the various spaces in which they encounter these activities—e.g., the home, museums, hobby fields, school, and after-school programs. However, because each such setting operates under different constraints and affordances, the forms of interest-based participation they spawn and support are qualitatively different. This symposium brings together four distinct research projects, each of which addresses very different settings, aspects, and phenomena in people’s interest-based participation in STEM. The projects also deploy very different methodologies to document and measure people’s interests. By comparing and contrasting these very distinct takes on interests and their manifestations across settings, we gain ...

Remembering What Produced the Data: Individual and Social Reconstruction in the Context of a Quantified Self Elementary Data and Statistics Unit

Cognition and Instruction

Abstract Given growing interest in K-12 data and data science education, new approaches are neede... more Abstract Given growing interest in K-12 data and data science education, new approaches are needed to help students develop robust understandings of and familiarity with data. The model of the quantified self—in which data about one’s own activities are collected and made into objects of study—provides inspiration for one such approach. By drawing on what one already knows about their self and their prior experiences, it may be possible to bootstrap students’ abilities to interpret and make sense of data. Taking that possibility seriously, this article describes some of the gains observed in students’ statistical reasoning following a quantified self, wearables-based elementary statistics unit and provides a theoretical framework drawing from cognitive psychology, embodiment, and situative perspectives to characterize how prior experience is used as a resource in data sense-making when the data are about students’ own physical experiences. This framework centralizes and interrogates the work of “remembering” prior experiences and articulates how remembering is involved in interpreting quantified self data. Specifically, the framework emphasizes that remembering in service of data interpretation is a reconstructive act that draws from both general and specific embodied resources and that the work of reconstructive remembering in the classroom is both individual and multi-participant work. To demonstrate measured learning gains and illustrate the framework, written assessment results and descriptive cases of student and teacher discussions about quantified self data from two sixth-grade classes participating in a classroom design experiment are provided. Both a discussion of and recommendations for ethical considerations related to quantified self data in education are also provided.

Introducing Coding through Tabletop Board Games and Their Digital Instantiations across Elementary Classrooms and School Libraries

Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Feb 26, 2020

This experience report describes an approach for helping elementary schools integrate computation... more This experience report describes an approach for helping elementary schools integrate computational thinking and coding by leveraging existing resources and infrastructure that do not rely on 1-1 computing. A particular focus is using the school library and media center as a site to complement and enhance classroom instruction on coding. Further, our approach builds upon "unplugged" knowledge and practices that are already familiar to and motivating for students, in this case tabletop board games. Through these games, students can use their prior knowledge and ease with tabletop gaming mechanics to cue relevant ideas for core computational concepts. We describe a model and an instructional unit spanning across classroom and school library settings that builds upon board game play as a source domain for computing knowledge. Building on expansive framing, the model emphasizes instructional linkages being made between one domain (the tabletop board game) and another (specially designed Scratch project shells with partially complete code blocks) such that the reasoning activities and different contexts are seen as instantiations of the same encompassing context. We present the experiences of three elementary school teachers as they implemented the unit in their classrooms and with their school librarian. We also show initial findings on the impact of the unit on student interest (N=87), as measured by preand post-surveys. We conclude with lessons learned about ways to improve the unit and future classroom implementations. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics~K-12 education • Social and professional topics~Computational thinking • Social and professional topics~Model curricula • Social and professional topics~Computer science education

The quantified self goes to school

Changing conceptual ecologies with task-structured science curricula

… of the 7th international conference on …, Jun 27, 2006

There is currently a great deal of interest in science curricula in which student learning is org... more There is currently a great deal of interest in science curricula in which student learning is organized around a single overarching task. One claim is that this approach can lead to a better understanding of scientific content, where content is understood in its original, narrow sense. As researchers, we would like to know if these claims about student content learning actually hold. Ideally, we would be able to map out students' changing conceptual ecologies. However, such work is theoretically and methodologically difficult. ...

How is science content layered into ESPN's SportScience?

by Victor Lee and Joel Drake

NARST, 2016

While it is often seen as an important basis for the development of popular awareness of science ... more While it is often seen as an important basis for the development of popular awareness of science (e.g., National Science Board, 2008), television programs have been minimally examined as artifacts in science education (Tal & Dierking, 2014). A number of popular television programs, however, do seek to depict and communicate science content.The goal of this paper is to begin to unpack how that is done. Specifically, it reports on an examination of a brief and frequently-aired television program that is intentionally designed to situate science content in non-science human activities – ESPN’s Sport Science – and does so through acts of visual annotation and composition.

Unplugged-to- Plugged Computer Science at the Library

Teacher Librarian, 2021

Conceptual Dynamics of Student Reasoning during Interviews Involving Discrepant Embodied Experiences

Journal for STEM Education Research, 2019

Clinical interviews are a research instrument for STEM education that elicit a variety of concept... more Clinical interviews are a research instrument for STEM education that elicit a variety of
conceptual dynamics. While some efforts have been made to document what conceptual
dynamics take place in such interviews, more remains to be done. This article describes
conceptual dynamics observed in two cases where high school students were interviewed and
responded to discrepant embodied experiences where what they predicted would take place
physically differed from what actually took place. One case involves discussing and enacting
projectile motion. The other case involves discussing and trying different configurations of
bicycle gearing. The cases illustrate a short-term conceptual change in response to the discrepant
experiences in which the same explanatory elements remained in their explanations over time,
but how various ideas and perceived attributes of the situation were organized changed.
Together, these cases illustrate an additional trigger for conceptual dynamics that have been as
yet undocumented in literature about interviews.

A BROAD VIEW OF WEARABLES AS LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES: CURRENT AND EMERGING APPLICATIONS

Learning in a Digital World - Perspectives on Interactive Technologies for Formal and Informal Education , 2019

Wearables have increasingly been appearing in various forms as technologies that have the potenti... more Wearables have increasingly been appearing in various forms as technologies that have the potential to support teaching and learning. This chapter surveys a number of recent and current wearable technology projects in the educational technology, learning sciences, and human-computer interaction literatures to illustrate the diversity of wearable technologies. It also identifies some regularities in how various forms of wearables are being deployed to support learning. These forms of support include using wearables to: promote personal expression; integrate digital information into social interactions; support educative role-play; provide just-in-time notification in a learning environment; and produce records of bodily experience for subsequent inspection, reflection, and interpretation. While examples of each support are provided, two more extended descriptions from the authors' recent and ongoing work with wearables are given as examples of how human and other animal bodily experiences can be harnessed to support learning. Future directions and considerations for educational technologists are discussed.