Ph.D. in Education, 2013
School of Education
February 1, 2010
Educational Technology Interests Include Game-like Learning
Melissa Kibrick is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Education at UC Irvine. Her specialization is Language, Literacy, and Technology. She received a double bachelor’s degree from University of California, San Diego in 2008 in Cognitive Science with a specialization in Human Cognition and Human Development. In 2010, she will present a paper at the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education conference on “Designing Professional Development for 21st Century Learning” with Assistant Professor Elizabeth van Es and Professor Mark Warschauer. She is also a co-author on a paper accepted at the American Educational Research Association’s conference for 2010.
During her undergraduate career, Melissa worked as a research assistant on flexible cognition, morpheme development, and developing programming software for school age children. Her senior thesis was on the use of behavioral management over various settings in a preschool classroom. Her experiences as an undergraduate inspired her move toward research on education technology.
At UC Irvine, Melissa has worked on a project evaluating the effectiveness of the 21st Century Learning reform. This research resulted in her first year project entitled “A Cognitive Model of Constructivist Reform Adoption” and the previously mentioned paper “Designing Professional Development for 21st Century Learning.”
Currently she is working on a large scale, longitudinal study with a collaboration of UC Irvine, the Mind Research Institute, and the Orange County Department of Education on the spatial-temporal math software Jiji Math. Melissa is assisting in providing background literature, completing cognitive testing, performing statistical analyses, and assisting in writing both internal and external reports of the studies progress.
Melissa’s research interests focus on embodied cognition during the human computer interactions of young children. She is interested in how touchscreen technology, as tabletop platforms, desktop and laptop monitors, and mobile platforms, can assist young learners in both acquisition and demonstration of knowledge. As a player of role-playing games in her free time, Melissa is also interested in game-like curriculum and the power it can have on learning.