Research Labs
School of Education and Social Policy faculty study how people learn and develop throughout life and in different settings. Our research falls into five areas:
- Education Policy
- Learning Sciences, Tech, Design
- Opportunity, Society, Civic Engagement
- Brain, Biology, Human Development, and the Lifespan
- Cross Cultural, Global Understanding and Learning
Explore current labs and research projects by research area, faculty contact or keyword.
| Lab or Center | Faculty Contact(s) | Research Area |
|---|---|---|
| Uri Wilensky, Amanda Peel (Postdoctoral Scholar) | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Emma K. Adam | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Cynthia Coburn | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Yang Qu | Education policy; Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan; Cross cultural learning and global understanding | |
| Nell O’Rourke, Matt Easterday | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Mesmin Destin | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Terri Sabol | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Nichole Pinkard | Learning sciences, technology, design; Opportunity, society, and civic engagement | |
| Ofer Malamud, Jon Guryan, Kirabo Jackson, Diane Schanzenbach, Hannes Schwandt | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Jonathan Guryan | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Nichole Pinkard | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Reed Stevens | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Jen Munson, Jennifer Richards, Bruce Sherin, Miriam Sherin | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Megan Bang | Learning sciences, technology, design; Opportunity, society, and civic engagement; Cross cultural learning and global understanding | |
| Hannes Schwandt | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Simone Ispa-Landa | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Claudia Haase | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Eva Lam, Jolie Matthews | Learning sciences, technology, design; Cross cultural learning and global understanding | |
| Brian Reiser | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Tabitha Bonilla, Quinn Mulroy, and Sally Nuamah | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| David Rapp | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| David Uttal | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Dan P. McAdams | Brain, biology, human development, and the lifespan | |
| Marcelo Worsley | Learning sciences, technology, design; Opportunity, society, and civic engagement | |
| Michael Horn | Learning sciences, technology, design | |
| Sepehr Vakil | Learning sciences, technology, design |
Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL)
The Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling is dedicated to the creative design and use of technology to deepen learning. Members of the lab are typically involved in designing new environments for learning. The lab works closely with many school partners as well as museums and other informal learning spaces. A major focus of the CCL is on the integration of computational modeling, such as our widely used NetLogo software, into curriculum and more broadly in natural and social science. The Lab explores how new representational systems can fundamentally change the way we think and reason about content domains. The lab is committed to the design of “low floor, high ceiling” tools and learning environments that are easy to get started with yet enable users to create powerful and complex constructions.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Uri Wilensky, Amanda Peel (Postdoctoral Scholar)
COAST Lab (Contexts of Adolescent Stress and Thriving)
We study how everyday life factors such as school, family, and peer relationships influence levels of stress, health, and well-being in children and adolescents. We try to trace the pathways by which stress “gets under the skin” to contribute to poor health and affect behavioral, academic, and emotional development.
By using noninvasive methods such as measurement of the stress-sensitive hormone cortisol, we study how adolescents react to stress, as well as explore how their daily experiences, stress hormone regulation, and sleep habits influence their everyday functioning as well as their health and well-being as they become adults.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Emma K. Adam
Coburn Projects
Bi-weekly project-specific meetings. Currently, active projects include: 1) a study of preK- 3 alignment in 4 small districts; 2) a study of the relationship between policy and practice in preK - grade 2 mathematics in two urban districts; 3) with Jim Spillane, a study of instructional decision making in four urban school districts in mathematics and ELA; and 4) with Bill Penuel (University of Colorado Boulder), a comparative study of three research-practice partnerships.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Cynthia Coburn
Culture, Brain, and Human Development Lab
Our lab takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and neuroscience to examine how sociocultural contexts shape adolescent development. In this vein, we have two lines of research. First, we investigate the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying cultural differences in adolescents’ academic, social, and emotional development. Second, we examine how parents influence adolescents’ beliefs, behavior, and brain, with attention to the implications for adolescents’ learning and psychological adjustment.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Yang Qu
Delta Lab
Delta Lab (is an interdisciplinary research lab and design studio lab of researchers in education, computer science, design and communications. Our driving mission is to improve the way we learn, design, work, and play by fundamentally changing how individuals and communities interact. Taking a unique interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, we tackle exciting research problems in project-based learning, student motivation, learning communities, educational games, and networked classrooms. We target diverse learning domains such as civics, entrepreneurship, computational thinking, and journalism.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Nell O’Rourke, Matt Easterday
Destin Lab
Our research investigates how social environments shape people's identities and the consequences for motivation, behaviors, and trajectories in life. We place particular emphasis on understanding the ways that socioeconomic resources come to influence young people's academic outcomes. Using social psychological methods, we conduct laboratory and school-based field experiments to examine the types of contexts, experiences, interactions, and information that support motivation and well-being for students from a variety of backgrounds.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Mesmin Destin
Development, Early Education and Policy Lab (DEEP Lab)
The DEEP lab applies developmental theory, psychological measurement, and mixed methods approaches to pressing social policy issues that affect children and families. We pay particular to the earliest stages of life (birth to age 5) and the ways in which advanced developmental theory and methods can inform early childhood programs and policies. The lab meetings include undergraduate students, full time research assistants, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. Students have the opportunity to present their work as well as participate in reading discussions, writing workshops, and one-time sessions on topics of interest led by experts in the field. Lab meeting times are TBD for Fall Quarter 2022.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Terri Sabol
Digital Youth Network (DYN)
The Digital Youth Network (DYN) is a hybrid digital literacy program that creates learning opportunities for underserved youth, both in the classroom and outside of school.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Nichole Pinkard
Econlab
A workshop for students to present work in progress related to the economics of education and social policy.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Ofer Malamud, Jon Guryan, Kirabo Jackson, Diane Schanzenbach, Hannes Schwandt
Education Lab
The Education Lab partners with civic and community leaders to identify, rigorously evaluate and learn how to scale programs and policies that improve education in America’s most distressed urban neighborhoods.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Jonathan Guryan
Equity in Learning Landscapes Lab
The Equity in Learning Landscapes Lab works with communities to reimagine their use of civic learning spaces (i.e., parks, libraries, community colleges, and community centers) to support residents across their lifespans in engaging in joyful STEAM learning and leisure experiences. Our lab provides enterprise-level sociotechnical systems to document, visualize, and analyze inequity in opportunity and the systemic structures and policies (e.g., redlining, school assignment) that have historically mediated access. While supporting communities in analyzing their landscape through their unique lens, the lab explores inequity of access through the lens of families raising Black daughters. We seek to develop a learning landscape and needed support tools to enable black girls to enter high school with healthy STEAM identities, a supportive network of peers and caring adult, and the knowledge of their STEAM superpowers and kryptonite. We are expand our methodological toolset to include social network and geospatial analysis to study the impact of place learning opportunity.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Nichole Pinkard
Everyday Learning
The focus of the Everyday Learning group is to understand learning and cognition in everyday life. Members of the Everyday Learning group conduct basic field studies in everyday cultural contexts such as families, schools, work, and play to understand how learning, teaching, and cognition are organized, socially and materially. These understandings often provide inspiration for the design of new learning environments; one example of such a learning environment designed from basic field studies of everyday learning is FUSE Studios. Research methods used by the group involve a variety of ‘experience near’ ethnographic methods, with a specialization in video-based interaction analysis.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Reed Stevens
Freezing Time Research Group
The Freezing Time Research Group at Northwestern University is driven by a shared understanding of the importance of mathematics and science teachers attending substantively to students' thinking and of the complexity of doing so. Group members investigate what teachers pay attention to in classrooms and how they make sense of and respond to what they notice. We explore new research methodologies and video technologies to access teachers’ thinking about pedagogically relevant moments in the classroom.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Jen Munson, Jennifer Richards, Bruce Sherin, Miriam Sherin
Gikendan Lab
The Indigenous Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (ISTEAM) project, funded by the National Science Foundation, employs cognitive and community co-design research to enhance general knowledge, develop pedagogical approaches, and provide learning materials for Indigenous families. The project focuses on understanding how individuals conceptualize relationships in the natural world, applying these insights to create learning tools in collaboration with community organizations. Additionally, the Learning in Places (LiP) initiative, in collaboration with the University of Washington, Bothell, engages in innovative research and practice for equitable socio-ecological systems learning. Meanwhile, the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project, conducted with colleagues at the University of Washington, Bothell, designs an interdisciplinary science course for prospective elementary school teachers, emphasizing anti-racist pedagogies and exploring the historical impact of science on marginalized communities. For more information, visit their respective websites.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Megan Bang
Health as Human Capital (Research Area)
Physical and mental health are core aspects of human development. Health matters both as an input in social and economic empowerment and as an endpoint determining personal and social wellbeing. My research seeks to explore the causal drivers of health disparities in our society and how those disparities translate into economic and social differences. Moreover, I study how economic and social disparities impact short- and long-term health outcomes.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Hannes Schwandt
Ispa-Landa Lab
A space for students to connect and present early drafts or works-in-progress. Email Simone to be added to the listserv.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Simone Ispa-Landa
Life-Span Development Lab
We examine pathways towards happy and healthy development across the life span with a focus on emotions in individuals and couples. Our research combines insights and paradigms from affective, life-span developmental, and relationship science. We use multiple methods (e.g., autonomic physiology, behavioral observations, subjective emotional experience assessments, linguistic markers, neuroimaging), age-diverse samples (e.g., from adolescence to late life), diverse study designs (e.g., experimental, longitudinal), and single-subjects and dyadic approaches (e.g., studying couples, parents and children, and friendship dyads).
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Claudia Haase
MoDAL
We share and collaborate on work that engages with cultural diversity and learning, with a converging interest in language and semiotic practices or literacy practices related to diverse media. We have also discussed converging interests in narrative, critical literacies, identity, and multimodality. We define literacy as how people use communication tools to represent and build knowledge and social relations. We are interested in understanding and designing contexts of literacy learning with diverse media - old, new and emerging - and especially those that afford transformative potentials for cultural expression and political engagement.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Eva Lam, Jolie Matthews
OpenSciEd
OpenSciEd, a collaboration of 10 state education agencies, develops and tests open-source science materials aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) They provide free access to these materials for all U.S. science teachers, enabling districts to prioritize teacher training over material development. The project encourages collaboration for innovative professional learning approaches among states, districts, and organizations. Reiser’s team collaborates with BSCS Science Learning to serve as the Instructional Materials Development Center, and with Boston College to help design professional learning supports.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Brian Reiser
Politics & Policy Lab (PPL)
The Politics & Policy Lab provides a place for students to explore ideas, thoughts, and questions on research that touches the political space. The workshop is designed to be interdisciplinary: attendees need not be experts on politics or policy, but we intend to, with your help, build a community for acquiring and sharing knowledge, and finding discussion, camaraderie, and guidance on writing and thinking about political topics. The lab is also inclusive of different methodological approaches; whether quantitative or qualitative, all are welcome and will find fellowship. You can sign up to be added to the lab's email listserv here and to present here.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Tabitha Bonilla, Quinn Mulroy, and Sally Nuamah
Reading Comprehension Lab
Comprehending and learning from texts we read, conversations we participate in, maps we study, and presentations we view requires unlocking the meanings associated with ideas, words, images, icons, and grammar. Research in our laboratory focuses on the nature of such comprehension by describing the activities and processes that comprise it. We also seek to facilitate these activities and processes by understanding comprehension difficulties and, with that knowledge, designing effective learning interventions.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- David Rapp
Spatial Thinking and Reasoning Lab
The Uttal Lab meets weekly (day/time TBD). At these meetings, students from both Learning Sciences and Psychology share research on cognitive development, symbol and map understanding, spatial thinking, STEM learning, and attitudes toward spatial thinking and STEM. Students in our research group do both qualitative and quantitative research in a wide variety informal and formal learning environments (e.g. classrooms, museums, laboratory) and with a wide variety of age groups (from toddlers to college students).
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- David Uttal
Study of Lives Research Group
The Study of Lives Research Group, the successor to the Foley Center for the Study of Lives, is dedicated to interdisciplinary research on personality development and the biographical study of individual human lives throughout life. Directed by Professor Dan P. McAdams, the group brings together graduate and undergraduate students in clinical psychology, Northwestern’s Personality/Development/Health (PDH) program, the Human Development and Social Policy (HDSP) doctoral program, and other departments and programs with a common interest in the scientific study of human lives. Research areas include life stories and narrative identity, generativity at midlife, personality traits and values, political psychology, narrative and culture, and psychological biography.
New
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Dan P. McAdams
Technological Innovations for Inclusive Learning and Teaching (TIILT) Lab
The Technological Innovations for Inclusive Learning and Teaching (TIILT) Lab aims to improve learning opportunities for students from under-served communities. Our work with technological innovations includes:
- co-designing activities with teachers and learners;
- creating interfaces that broaden participation in meaningful learning experience; and
- tools and analytic techniques for studying and supporting complex learning environments.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Marcelo Worsley
TIDAL Lab (Tangible Interaction Design and Learning Laboratory
TIDAL Lab is a team of designers, artists, learning scientists, and computer scientists at Northwestern University. Our research creates and studies innovative technology-based learning experiences. We take a cautious but optimistic stance towards technology in a process that tightly couple research and design. Our work on the TunePad project introduces students to digital music production using Python code.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Michael Horn
TREE Lab (Technology, Race, Equity & Ethics in Education Lab)
The TREE Lab within the School of Education and Social Policy is an NSF-funded initiative that brings together NU undergraduate students with youth and community members to jointly investigate ethical, social, and racialized dimensions of new technologies. Our lab designs tools and environments that facilitate engagement with complex technologies in ways that make visible their sociopolitical and ethical dimensions and implications. We draw on a range of conceptual and methodological approaches including critical theory, learning sciences, HCI, sociocultural theory, and participatory design.
Affiliated SESP Faculty
- Sepehr Vakil