Clark Chinn
Rutgers University
Life sciences
Clark A. Chinn is a Professor of Educational Psychology at Rugters University. His research teams are current working on two interconnected lines of research. In the first line of research (the Epistemic Education project), we are exploring new approaches to conceptualizing and investigating epistemic cognition. Our goal is then to develop instructional methods that help students reason more effectively in authentic situations such as reasoning about information found on the Internet. The second project is the PRACCIS project (Promoting Reasoning and Conceptual Change In Science), an ongoing collaboration with Ravit Golan Dunca. In this project, we investigate scaffolds that promote growth in reasoning in middle school science classes. We have developed curricula that are aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards and that promote conceptual change and model-based reasoning in the life sciences.