Xuesong Cang

Biography

I am a graduate student in Learning Science, the Ph.D. program at the Department of Educational Psychology of University of Wisconsin, Madison. I started my degree on Sep. 2020 and expected to finish on May 2025. I am working with Dr. Sadhana Puntambekar, who is the director of the Interactive Learning and Design Lab.

I’m particularly interested in the design-based research which helps to better support middle students in learning STEM. I believe that the designing and implementing of distributed scaffolds would benefit students in learning sciences and teachers in teaching. The scaffolds that I'm interested in are mainly related to technologies (i.e., simulations, digital notebook, automated feedback). I'm working on the explorations of students' scientific explanations, which aims to better support middle school students in writing and improve the technology tools. In my current project, students use the feedback that is given by automated assessment of a Natural Language Processing software, PyrEval.

I have a master’s degree in Educational Policy, MA. I’m also interested in how to generalize our research to a larger student population.