Gaoxia Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Curriculum & Pedagogy Program at OISE, University of Toronto. Her research lies at the intersection of learning sciences, curriculum studies, and educational technology with a focus on understanding and supporting students’ social, cognitive, and emotional dynamics with the support of learning analytics in collaborative inquiry learning environments. She works with Dr. Marlene Scardamalia and Dr. Jim Slotta on conducting design experiments to support students’ productive knowledge building and emotional well-being at the elementary and graduate school levels, respectively. To broaden her research on students’ interactions in technology-enhanced environments, she participated in two collaborative National Science Foundation-funded projects. Through the projects, she investigated how students’ transformative and non-transformative discourse related to their conceptual learning and problem-solving performance, as well as how students’ engineering design behaviors, regulation behaviors, and design iterations influence their design performance in a 3D engineering design environment. Her articles have been published in journals such as the Internet and Higher Education, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Computers & Education, and Computers in Human Behaviors.
