Dr. Ha Nguyen

Assistant Professor


Dr. Ha  Nguyen

Contact Information

Office Location: EDUC 226
Phone: 435-797-1556
Email: ha.nguyen@usu.edu
Additional Information:

Educational Background

Ph.D. in Education (Concentrations: Digital Learning and Media & STEM Teaching and Learning), University of California Irvine

MA in Education, University of California Irvine

BA in Public Policy & Japanese, Duke University

Biography

Dr. Nguyen’s research integrates learning sciences, learning analytics, and human-centered design to promote deeper learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) contexts for diverse learners. Her research explores how to give students the opportunity to collaborate and reflect on their learning through two strands:

Design in Partnership. She employs user-centered, participatory approaches with students, educators, and community members to develop systems that provide adaptive, formative feedback to enrich classroom discourse and student understanding. Recent projects include developing data visualizations for iterative improvement in Mathematics classrooms and designing a text-based conversational agent to promote productive discussion and learning in science classrooms.

Analytics. She applies learning analytics to understand how to foster student-driven discussion and learning regulation. She uses a range of methodologies, including text mining, process mining, social network analysis, and epistemic network analysis.

Dr. Nguyen is excited to work with PhD, Master’s, and undergraduate students interested in doing research at the intersection of design, analytics, and partnerships.

If you're interested in joining her lab, reach out at ha.nguyen@usu.edu.

Featured Work



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Designing Conversational Agents for Discussion and Systems Thinking

This work examines how different role designs of a conversational agent can facilitate productive discussion and learning of complex scientific systems. Currently, Dr. Nguyen and her students are exploring ways to (1) leverage natural language understanding and machine learning to expand the agents’ conversation capacities and (2) codesign other agent prototypes with students and community partners.

Selected Publications

(See CV or personal website for a comprehensive list of publications)

STEM Teaching & Learning
Nguyen, H. (2022). Let’s Teach Kibot: Discovering discussion patterns between student groups and two conversational agent designs. British Journal of Educational Technology. http://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13219

Nguyen, H., Lim, K.Y., Fischer, C., Wu, L., Washington, G., & Warschauer, M. (2021). Peer support and temporality in regulated learning. Learning & Instruction. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2021.101443

Nguyen, H., & Santagata, R. (2020). Impact of computer modeling on learning and teaching systems thinking. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.21674

Design and Analytics
Nguyen, H., Campos, F., & Ahn, J. (2021). Designing for generative uncertainty in learning dashboards. In Ifenthaler, D., & Muhittin, S. (Eds), Visualizations and Dashboards for Learning Analytics.

Campos, F., Ahn, J., Digiacomo, D., Nguyen, H., & Hays, M. One chart, many meanings: Making sense of sensemaking in learning analytics dashboard design. (2021). Journal of Learning Analytics. https://www.learning-analytics.info/index.php/JLA/article/view/7113

Nguyen, H., & Young, W. (2022). Knowledge Construction and Uncertainty in Real World Argumentation: A Text Analysis Approach. In LAK22: 12th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3506860.3506864