ENGRAMMETRON facilities enable simultaneous observation and acquisition of audio data from talking-aloud reflective protocols; video data of facial and bodily expression; and screen capture. Instrumentation supports: lectroencephalography (EEG); electrocardiography (EKG); electromyography (EMG); and eye-tracking (ET) capability. Orbiting this constellation of observational methods around computer enhanced learning platforms offers unprecedented flexibility and potential for educational research.
ENGRAMMETRON: Educational Neuroscience Laboratory
Principal Investigator: Dr. Stephen Campbell
Funding Agency: Canada Foundation for Innovation
What's Proposed
The ENGRAMMETRON will help establish educational neuroscience as a rigorous and humanistically oriented area of scientific inquiry, connecting the fields of cognitive neuroscience and educational psychology. ENGRAM/ME investigations are initially focusing on improving mathematics teacher education and instructional design of computer-assisted learning in ways that teachers and students alike can learn mathematics in less threatening and more gratifying manners, and in ways that will enable learners to gain deeper aesthetic appreciations for and conceptual understandings of mathematics and its applications.
How This Project is Carried Out
The ENGRAMMETRON provides ENGRAM/ME members, and ENGRAM associates more generally, with means to quantify learning human minds/bodies in action. Aspirations for the ENGRAMMETRON include expediting and establishing international affiliations, collaborations, and developing expertise and highly trained personnel in this important and potentially foundational new area of educational research.
The Canada Foundation for Innovation’s New Opportunities Program has provided Dr. Stephen R. Campbell with funding to establish a mathematics educational neuroscience laboratory, a.k.a., the ENGRAMMETRON, one of the world’s first facilities specifically designed for and dedicated to research in educational neuroscience. The ENGRAMMETRON is envisioned to serve as a magnet facility for the Educational Neuroscience Group for Research into Affect and Mentation / in Mathematics Education (ENGRAM/ME). The ENGRAMMETRON aims toward accommodating needs of ENGRAM research associates more generally, beyond this primary specialisation in mathematics education.
Why This Project Matters
Our research applies these new methods of educational neuroscience to a wide variety of issues of interest to educational researchers and educators in general. Our main focus to date is on understanding teachers' mathematical thinking and their anxieties about mathematics and teaching that subject. Our goals are to help improve the former and to alleviate the latter. At this time we are also investigating ESL anxieties, usability of educational technology, and the educational potential of biofeedback and neurofeedback in particular.
How This Project is Put into Action
At this early stage in the development of educational neuroscience, the ENGRAMMETRON project is having more of an effect on the practice of research, both in education and in the cognitive sciences, than it yet has had on the practice of teaching and learning per se.
Where to Learn More
For more information regarding projects, publications, and opportunities to support and participate in this endeavour, please visit <engrammetron.net> or contact Stephen (Sen) Campbell 1-778- 782-3630 or email <sencael@sfu.ca>.
ENGRAMMETRON on the Knowledge Network