SIG 20 & 26 Conference 2024

Kalypso Iordanou is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), Cyprus. She received her PhD in Educational Psychology from Columbia University in New York, after receiving a Fulbright scholarship. Her work focuses on argument skills, epistemic cognition, reasoning in online engagement, and using technology to promote thinking-skills and learning. Her work has been supported by several research bodies including the European Commission and the Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF). Some of the projects she has been working on are the design of interventions for supporting students’ argumentation skills and reducing prejudice (ARE-PRED, Excellence Hubs-RIF), ethical issues of AI and Big Data that challenges democracy (SHERPA, Horizon 2020), trust in science (VERITY, Horizon-Europe), and extremist reasoning in social media (SMIDGE, Horizon-Europe). Her research achievements have been honored by awards from several bodies, such as the Fulbright Commission – supporting a Visiting Fellowship at Columbia University (US) in 2017- and the Research and Innovation Foundation, awarding her the National Young Researcher Award.

Sam Wineburg (samwineburg.com) is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies at Stanford University. Educated at Brown University and UC/Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden’s Umeå University. In 2004, Wineburg founded the Stanford History Education Group, a curriculum development effort that has grown into the largest provider of free curriculum in the social studies, with over 17 million downloads of its curriculum and assessments. Since 2016 his research has focused on “Civic Online Reasoning,” or how people judge the credibility of information on the Internet— research that has been featured in TIME Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and on multiple occasions in the New York Times. In 2021, UNESCO honored him with its International Media Literacy Award. In 2024, Wineburg retired from Stanford to co-found the Digital Inquiry Group, a nonprofit organization that provides free resources to schools and universities

Wineburg’s interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in outlets as diverse as Cognitive Science and the Journal of American History. His public scholarship has appeared in places like the New York Times, USAToday, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and the Smithsonian Magazine. His 2002 book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for work that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.” His latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, is entitled Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (Chicago, 2023).

Dr. John Nesbit is a professor of educational psychology and educational technology & learning design at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Through meta-analyses and primary studies, his research group investigates fundamental and applied topics in the learning sciences. After a PhD program that investigated application of machine learning to instructional design (University of Alberta, 1988), he spent 5 years as a visiting scholar and faculty member at Tsukuba University and Seishin University in Japan. Since joining Simon Fraser University, he has collaborated with colleagues to publish research on evaluation of digital learning resources, concept mapping, multimedia learning, self-regulated learning, self-explanation, and intelligent tutoring systems. In recent years, his research group has focused on two topics relevant to the EARLI SIG 20 & 26 Conference: Tutor guidance in simulation-based inquiry learning and argument visualization in postsecondary courses. The research on guidance in inquiry learning starts with the general premise, now widely accepted, that interactive, scaffolded assistance during inquiry tasks is beneficial and investigates which types of guidance (and which triggering conditions for that guidance) are most effective. This research has collected, and is engaged in analysing, over 230 hours of video in which human tutors follow instructional heuristics and/or scripts to guide learners interacting with a scientific simulation. The research on argument visualization has developed, deployed, and evaluated a web-based argument mapping tool (DMap) for scaffolding student argumentation in university courses across a wide range of disciplines.