Research Experience
My research is focused on creating digital learning tools for young children. In particular, I empirically examine the factors that lead to increased educational effectiveness. Notably, I am interested in the role of digital technologies to transform teaching and learning. My current projects aim for technological advancements in formal and informal learning environments.
Wisdom: The World of Emotions
Company: Better Kids
I am currently a product design intern for Better Kids. I conducted qualitative interviews to analyze data collected and prepared recommendations to improve customer conversion (from app discovery to app download and subscription activation) and retention (average subscription duration). I led the recruitment process for both existing and prospective customers.
AI Conversational Agents
Mentors: Professor Mark Warschauer and Ph.D. Student Ying Xu
Our team created a conversational agent that could engage young children in a story-related conversation and narrate a story from a book through a Google Home device. I directly contributed to the development of our machine learning Google Home conversational agent, testing for any flaws in the execution of our use cases, examining the layout of the project, and analyzing the interviews with the children who interacted with the conversational agent.
Additionally, I am investigating young children’s perceptions of conversational agents. Our participants consisted of 26 typically developing children between the age of 3 to 6. Each child responded to a series of questions assessing the child's perception of the conversational agent’s cognitive, psychological, and behavioral properties.
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Toddlers' Usage of Devices
Mentors: Professor Mark Warschauer and Ph.D. Student Robert Tom Kalinowski
I am involved in a multi-case ethnography involving 13 families and 15 children in the target 3-4-year-old age range. These families span three distinct communities in Southern California and were recruited expressly to maximize variability in child and family characteristics. In the study presented here, we examined two children from the same neighborhood and focus on their abilities and preferences with screen use. We visited each family 6 times over a period of three months for 1-2 hours per visit. Visits were unstructured, with the proviso that the parent thought the child would be using screens when the visit was scheduled. We observed both screen use behaviors and also behaviors that did not involve screens. Visits were video and audio recorded. Parents and family members were consulted repeatedly in semi-structured interviews.
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SIGCHI Toddlers of the YouTube Generation: Close Friends with Differing Screen Usage Paper
Google Hub, Smartphone, Smart TV: a 3-4 Year Old’s Use of Technology in the Home Paper
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Spatial Songs
Mentors: Professor Drew Bailey and Ph.D. Student Robert Tom Kalinowski
Play-based activities are important teaching tools in early childhood educational settings. Abstract concepts have been increasingly implicated in the learning of children’s early academic skills, but young children are better at understanding concrete skills. The effectiveness of incorporating abstract concepts into play-based activities is not well understood. One way to improve our understanding in this area is to assess the potential to keep children engaged in a play-based activity that focuses on abstract, rather than concrete concepts.
We coded intervention videos from “The Spatial Song” experiment, in which children (n=80) at a Southern California preschool site were randomly assigned to hear and gesture along either to a song full of spatial vocabulary (abstract content) or a very similar song about adult occupations (concrete content). We coded videos of six of the 13 intervention sessions - three spatial/abstract and three occupational/concrete—operationalizing “engagement” as children singing words and doing gestures. The six videos coded included over 18,000 opportunities to say a target word and over 18,000 opportunities to perform a targeted gesture, totaled over all children in either condition.
Results of cross tabulation show higher rates of singing the target word and higher rates of doing the target gesture for the abstract content group versus the concrete content group. This indicates that children can be engaged in a play-based activity with the goal of teaching abstract content, and their level of engagement can be comparable to activities that are similar on their surface but designed to teach concrete knowledge.
I was an integral member of the team, administering cognitive assessments to preschool-aged children, scoring tests, entering and cleaning data, data analysis, and presentation of findings. I worked with a Ph.D. student and professor to collect data at a Head Start site, analyzing the spatial gestures and words of 80 preschool children. Additionally, as a volunteer lab manager, I was in charge of recruiting prospective research assistants, coordinating transportation to and from research sites, scheduling lab meetings, updating IRB, and other administrative duties.
Perceptions of Housing Insecurity
Mentor: Professor Elliot Currie
Project Hope Alliance is a nonprofit organization in Costa Mesa that seeks to end the cycle of homelessness, one child at a time. As a grant writer and research intern, I wrote 13 grants which accumulated a net total of $32,300 worth of funding for Project Hope Alliance to support different educational and family support programs. I wrote grants that allowed Project Hope Alliance to provide young children with the intensive support that meets their psychosocial, individual, and academic needs. To receive support from funders, I had to share the stories of families and children overcoming homelessness and what the public needed to do to support them.
At this organization, I had the responsibility to portray the mission and goals of Project Hope Alliance to potential funders. I regularly tasked to advise and strategically influence the organization’s CEO, President, and Director of Finance on allocation funding to our programs. As a grant writer, I constantly need to look at the organization’s financials to see the budget needs of the three programs that we have. I researched why the program is the solution for the present issue and what are the best methods to support our proposed solution. With this, I was able to successfully help prioritize certain programs on multiple occasions, with the funding that I raised for the organization.
