UWG News Archive

Psychology faculty members receive Development Fellowships

March 18, 2004

CARROLLTON, GA - Two members of the psychology faculty at the University of West Georgia have recently received Faculty Development Fellowships from the University System of Georgia (USG) Board of Regents. These fellowships allow faculty from other universities and colleges in the USG to collaborate with faculty from the Georgia Institute of Technology in mutually beneficial partnerships involving teaching and research.

Dr. Kareen Malone, professor, and Dr. Lisa Osbeck, assistant professor, joined a National Science Foundation funded research project that examines cognitive practices in laboratory learning. The project is headed by Dr. Nancy Nersessian, professor of cognitive science and coordinator of the Cognitive Science Program at Georgia Tech, and Dr. Wendy Newstetter, director of Learning Sciences Research at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech/Emory University School of Medicine.

This interdisciplinary research team operates within the Cognitive Science Program at Georgia Tech, but draws on diverse research skills and approaches including ethnography, social psychology, and cognitive-historical analysis.

The group has been explicitly recognized by NSF for its innovative interdisciplinary approach to research on learning in science.

Malone was pivotal in obtaining supplementary grant monies to sustain research on gender, social relations, and scientific practice in laboratory settings. Osbeck has helped with qualitative analysis of protocols on learning and cognition and will continue to serve as a research consultant in the following years.

These research projects are not merely “academic” exercises but have resulted in papers directed toward a critical re-examination of pedagogy in science learning, particularly in interdisciplinary communities. The research on gender is aimed at a perennial problem in engineering and many branches of science, namely the retention of typically marginalized groups (e.g. women and minorities) within science at the higher levels (e.g. in funded research setting or the doctoral level).

The team has also contributed to the growing body of thought on distributed/situated cognition. The ideas the group has been developing constitute a significant departure from many previous formulations that focus on static systems of cognition/problem solving (even if the problem changes) or on processes within the individual knower.

This group conceives of knowing as a dynamic “problem space” that involves the whole laboratory, including what the lab studies (e.g. cells), the history of its instruments, their current implementation, and, of course, the scientists themselves.

Malone has co-authored/authored two publications that have emerged directly out of this research and uses her experiences at Georgia Tech to help her students understand gender in her class, Psychology of Gender.

Osbeck is currently collaborating on a manuscript for publication and will use her involvement in the program to help her students develop skills in qualitative research. West Georgia students have already participated in aspects of research related to this project. Both Osbeck and Malone are scheduled to present conference papers based on this research.

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