In my research on Arts Education, I have concentrated on four core issues: Learning, Language Acquisition, Evaluation, and Assessment. Together with James Catterall, we have conducted a series of research projects, including investigating the impact of the arts on cognitive aspects of learning such as motivation, self-efficacy, and creativity. We have also created new assessment techniques to measure arts learning. I have recently expanded this research on arts and learning with a multi-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Education, which seeks to develop and disseminate exemplary models of arts education.
Research Interests
Media Arts Practices
Arts Education
New Technologies & Informal Learning
This effort explores the after-school technology practices of youth engaged in creative production and game play. Using a community partnerships model, which sends Undergraduate mentors to after-school clubs to learn alongside members, we are studying the impact of these partnerships on both the youth and the mentors. In particular, we have been studying several different types of software, ranging from commercial games (such as Harmonix’s Rock Band) to new programming environments (such as Scratch, a new media-rich, networked environment designed to enhance the development of technological fluency, for which I was part of the development team).
The integration of Arts Education and New Technologies was at the heart of my dissertation project, "Creative Bytes: Literacy and Learning in the Media Arts Practices of Urban Youth." This work was the starting point for several subsequent studies that have focused on the literacy practices of marginalized youth. Here, I have examined youth practices from multiple perspectives, including that of arts educators, media educators, and literacy theorists. Investigating how youth make sense of new media has the potential to teach us about learning and literacy in the age of multimedia.