Dr. Megan Humburg
Research
My research centers on student engagement and how we can apply dimensions of engagement (emotional, social, cognitive, and behavioral) to analyze the effectiveness of collaborative learning environments. I use the interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences field to bring together ideas from educational psychology, science education, music education, and sociocultural theories to design learning activities that spark curiosity, playfulness, and joy as students engage in inquiry together.
My projects focus on how we as educators and researchers can design activities that engage learners as whole people. My research often integrates student engagement with embodied learning activities, which leverage bodily motion as a resource for building understanding together. I have also helped to design and implement a variety of educational technologies, including mixed-reality environments, network analysis tools, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support engagement.
I have explored how student engagement manifests and can be supported across science, history, and music learning contexts, as well as across a variety of age groups (elementary, middle school, and post-secondary learners). What unites all this work is a desire to understand how and why learners engage with some activities and not others, so that we can design more effective and engaging learning environments that can reignite those 'lost sparks' for disengaged learners (and prevent them from being lost in the first place).
Employment
Currently, I work as a PostDoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, as a member of the EngageAI Institute. I help to design narrative storylines for game-based learning environments where students can investigate socio-scientific issues such as the role of community gardens in food justice. I collaborate with researchers in both Core AI and AI in Education to design and iterate on adaptive AI-driven narratives, embodied conversational agents driven by large-language models that can support the inquiry process, and multimodal learning analytics that utilize advances in computer vision to better understand learner engagement.
Teaching
I have taught several undergraduate courses about theories of teaching and learning, including Educational Psychology for Elementary Teachers and Educational Psychology for All Grades. I have taught both in-person and in asynchronous online contexts. Currently, I am teaching a graduate-level course titled AI in Education, a new course offering that I have designed for the IU Learning Sciences program that emphasizes theoretical, ethical, and critical layers of designing and implementing AI tools for learning.
Education
I earned my Ph.D. in Learning and Developmental Sciences at Indiana University in 2022 and earned my Master's in Learning and Developmental Sciences (M.S.Ed.) at IU in 2017. I graduated with a Bachelor's of Arts in Psychology and Child Studies from Vanderbilt University in 2015.