SESP Faculty

Matthew Easterday

Faculty Profile

Matt Easterday’s research focuses on technology for the new civics – producing scientifically supported educational technology to create informed and engaged citizens who can solve the serious policy problems facing our society such as poverty, climate change and militarism. Training these types of people requires understanding how competent citizens analyze policy, communicate issues, and organize to make change. It also requires designing more effective educational technology that can teach the knowledge, skills and dispositions citizens need.

Easterday received his PhD in 2010 from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a fellow in the Institute for Educational Science’s Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research and a Siebel Scholar.

Technology for the new civics – producing scientifically supported educational technology to create informed and engaged citizens who can solve the serious policy problems facing society such as poverty, global warming and militarism. Training such citizens requires us to understand how competent citizens analyze policy, communicate issues, and organize to make change. It also requires us to design more effective educational technology that can teach the knowledge, skills and dispositions citizens need.

• 2017 – Northwestern Public Voices Fellowship
• 2015 – Northwestern Ver Steeg Graduate Advising Award
• 2009 – Siebel Fellowship
• 2005 – Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research Fellowship

Easterday, M. W. (Working Paper/In Press/Under Review). Policy World: A cognitive game for teaching deliberationin N. Pinkwart and B. McLaren (Eds.), Educational technologies for teaching argumentation skills.

Easterday, Matthew; Rees-Lewis, Daniel; Fitzpatrick, Colin; Gerber, Elizabeth (2014). Computer supported novice group critique. Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: 405-414.

Easterday, Matthew; Jo, I. Yelee (2014). Replay penalties in cognitive games. Lecture Notes in Computer Science: 388-397.

Easterday, Matthew; Jo, Yelee (2013). Game penalties decrease learning and interest. Lecture Notes in Computer Science: 787-790.

Phelan, Pete; Rees-Lewis, Daniel; Easterday, Matthew; Gerber, Elizabeth (2013). Using mobile technology to support innovation education. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Conference: 333-334.

Easterday, Matthew; Aleven, Vincent; Scheines, Richard; Carver, Sharon (2011). Using tutors to improve educational games. Lecture Notes in Computer Science: 63-71.

Easterday, M. W., Aleven, V., Scheines, R. and Carver, S. M. (2009). Constructing causal diagrams to learn deliberation.International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education.

Scheines, R., Easterday, M. and Danks, D. (2006). Teaching the normative theory of causal reasoning in A. Gopnik and L. Schulz (Eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation (pp. 119-38). Oxford University Press.