Michelene T.H. Chi

Michelene T. H. Chi is the director of the Learning Sciences Institute and a foundation professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Arizona State University. She is a cognitive science researcher interested in issues of how students learn. Her early research investigated the role of knowledge in children’s competence as well as in differences in the representations between adult novices and experts. She discovered an important phenomenon that self-explaining increases learning more than receiving explanations, and pioneered a method of analyzing verbal explanations that is both quantitative and qualitative. She has done seminal studies on many other learning methods, include learning from being tutored, from collaborating, and from observing and overhearing tutorial dialogues. Another area of her research focuses on the origin of scientific misconceptions and she has explored approaches to teaching emergent, robustly misconceived processes. Recently she introduced a framework that defines active learning by differentiating students’ learning activities as passive, active, constructive or interactive, and compares their relative effectiveness. She has over 100 publications and 25 of them have over 200 citations each. Two have been ranked the first and seventh most highly cited articles published in the journal Cognitive Science.