The Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) recently announced Ryan Baker, associate professor in the teaching, learning, and leadership division of Penn’s Graduate School of Education and director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics, as this year’s recipient of the society’s Educational Research Award. The Educational Research Award recognizes a leader in educational research to improve children’s learning and understanding.

Dr. Baker researches how students use and learn from educational games, intelligent tutors and other kinds of educational software. Drawing on the fields of educational data mining, learning analytics and human–computer interaction, he develops methods for mining the data that come out of the interactions between students and educational software. He then uses this information to improve the understanding of how students respond to educational software, and how these responses influence their learning.

CSSP noted in the announcement that by “using automated detectors of data, he has made real-time inferences about students’ motivational and meta-cognitive behaviors. His deep understanding of the myriad of complexities of that transition have led to models of basic discoveries about human learning and learners.”