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Michelle Jordan
Associate Professor
Faculty, TEMPE Campus, Mailcode 5411
Biography:
Michelle E. Jordan's interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on peer interaction during the creative collaboration between students, students, and teachers, or members of work teams in formal and informal learning contexts. She examines how peers experience, express and manage uncertainty as they engage in collaborative problem-solving. Professor Jordan is particularly interested in the roles that sense-making and improvisation play in collaborative learning, with individuals and groups taking actions and making interpretations as they collectively design solutions to complex problems. Her scholarship is grounded in notions of learning as a social process, influenced by complexity theories, sociocultural theories, sociolinguistics, and the learning sciences.
Professor Jordan was the recipient of a ASU Knoweldge Exchange for Community Resilience Fellowship (2020) and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Outstanding Promising Research Scholar Award (2016). She is currently the Education Director of QESST, an National Science Foundation (NSF) Solar Engineering Research Center. She is researching how middle school students navigate communication challenges during collaborative engineering design projects. She and her eighth-grade science teacher colleague are using a design-based approach to investigate the role of a peer observer in helping team members increase awareness and improve how they negotiate peer interaction associated with the task and social aspects of engineering design.
Education:
- Ph.D., Educational Psychology (Learning, Cognition, and Motivation), University of Texas-Austin 2010. Dissertation: Managing Uncertainty through Peer Discourse during Collaborative Design Tasks.
- Master's degree. Music Education, Texas State University 2001
- Bachelor's degree. Music Education (honors), University of Colorado-Boulder 1993
Google Scholar URL:
Research Interests:
Guiding Research Questions:
- How can every K-12 student become a creative collaborator?
- How do learners manage uncertainty during collaborative design projects?
- How can teacher preparation programs support pre-service teachers as collaborative designers of learning environments?
Current Research Projects:
Jordan is researching how middle school students navigate communication challenges during collaborative engineering design projects. Along with her eighth-grade science teacher colleague, they are using a design-based approach to investigate the role of a peer observer in helping team members increase awareness and improve how they negotiate peer interaction associated with task and social aspects of engineering design.
As a teacher educator, Jordan is interested in understanding how pre-service teachers learn to collaborate as professional colleagues. Using mixed-methods study, Jordan worked with a team to analyze surveys, interviews, artifacts, and observations of pre-service work-groups designing instructional projects in order to identify high-quality discourse and the beliefs that foster such discourse.
Interested in understanding opportunities of creative, entrepreneurial and design-based environments for learning, Jordan and colleagues observed and interviewed participants in an intensive three-day workshop as they developed a startup company in multi-disciplinary teams. This qualitative case study aimed to understand how ideas and experiences evolved during and through the design thinking process.
Publications:
Ricca, B. P., Bowers, N. & Jordan, M. E. (2019). Seeking emergence through temporal analysis of collaborative-group discourse: A complex-systems approach. The Journal of Experimental Education, Doi: 10.1080/00220973.2019.1628691
Zuiker, S., Jordan, M. E., & the Learning Landscapes Collaboratory (2019). Inter-Organizational design thinking in education: Joint work between learning sciences courses and a zoo education program. Open Education Studies, 1, 1-23. Doi: 10.1515/edu-2019-0001
Stewart, O. & Jordan, M. E. (2017). Some explanation here: A case study of learning opportunities and tensions in an informal science learning environment. Instructional Science, 45, 137–156. Doi: 10.1007/s11251-016-9396-7
Jordan, M. E. (2016). Teaching as designing: Preparing pre-service teachers for adaptive teaching. Theory into Practice, 55(3), 197-206.
Zuiker, S. Anderson, K., Jordan, M. E. & Stewart, O. (2016). Complementary lenses: Using theories of situativity and complexity to understand collaborative learning as systems-level social activity. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 9, 80-94.
Jordan, M. E. (2015). Extra! Extra! Read all about it: Interactive read-alouds of a dynamic text with real-time local information. Elementary School Journal, 15(3), 358-383. doi:10.1086/680174
Jordan, M. E. & McDaniel, R. (2014). Managing uncertainty during collaborative problem solving in elementary school teams: The role of peer influence in robotics engineering activity. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 23(4), 490-536. doi: 10.1080/10508406.2014.896254
Jordan, M. E., Cheng, A. J., & the D-Team (2014). “I guess my question is”: What is the co-occurrence of uncertainty and learning in computer-mediated discourse? International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 9(4), 451-475. doi:10.1007/s11412-014-9203-x
| Spring 2021 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| SCN 400 | Sustainabl for Sci Teacher |
| LSE 542 | Research Methods Learning Sci |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| DCI 792 | Research |
| DCI 799 | Dissertation |
| Fall 2020 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| EDP 311 | Ed Psych for Future Teachers |
| EDT 790 | Reading and Conference |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| DCI 799 | Dissertation |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Spring 2020 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| EDP 310 | Ed Psychology for Non-Teachers |
| LSE 542 | Research Methods Learning Sci |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDP 792 | Research |
| DCI 792 | Research |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Fall 2019 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| LSE 571 | History of Learning Sciences |
| LSE 591 | Seminar |
| EDT 790 | Reading and Conference |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Spring 2019 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| EDP 311 | Ed Psych for Future Teachers |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| DCI 792 | Research |
| EDP 792 | Research |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Fall 2018 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDT 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Spring 2018 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| EDP 311 | Ed Psych for Future Teachers |
| LSE 542 | Research Methods Learning Sci |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDP 792 | Research |
| DCI 792 | Research |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Fall 2017 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| EDP 311 | Ed Psych for Future Teachers |
| TEL 703 | Innovation-Teaching&Learning |
| EDT 790 | Reading and Conference |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Spring 2017 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| DCI 691 | Seminar |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDP 792 | Research |
| TEL 799 | Dissertation |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |
| Fall 2016 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| TEL 703 | Innovation-Teaching&Learning |
| DCI 790 | Reading and Conference |
| EDT 790 | Reading and Conference |
| TEL 799 | Dissertation |
| EDP 799 | Dissertation |