Clark Chinn Named 2016 AERA Fellow

Dr. Clark A. Chinn, Professor and Chair of Educational Psychology at Rutgers Graduate School of Education (GSE), will be inducted as an American Educational Research Association Fellow this April during the AERA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Fellows are selected on the basis of their notable and sustained research achievements. They were nominated by their peers, selected by the AERA Fellows Committee, and approved by the AERA Council, the association’s elected governing body.

Chinn is among 22 newly selected Fellows to be honored this year. They will join 602 current AERA Fellows, including the following GSE faculty:

  • Gregory Camilli

  • William A. Firestone

  • Angela M. O’Donnell

  • Dorothy Strickland (Emeriti)

  • Daniel Tanner (Emeriti)

“We are delighted to honor these 22 scholars for their contributions to education research and for their dedication to the field,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “AERA Fellows exemplify the highest standards of excellence through accomplishment, professionalism, and commitment.”

Chinn’s research focuses on reasoning and argumentation, epistemic practices and epistemic cognition, conceptual change, and collaborative learning. His research teams are current working on two interconnected lines of research.

The Promoting Reasoning and Conceptual Change In Science (PRACCIS) project is an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Ravit Golan Duncan, Associate Professor at the GSE. The PRACCIS team has developed middle-school curricula that are aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards and that promote conceptual change and model-based reasoning in the life sciences. The project has investigated processes of teaching and learning within these learning environments, focusing particularly on scaffolds that promote growth in reasoning.

The Epistemic Education project is exploring new approaches to conceptualizing and investigating epistemic cognition. The team has drawn on philosophical scholarship to inform the development of new models of epistemic cognition and explored the implications of these environments for improving instruction. The goal is to develop instructional methods that help students reason more effectively in authentic situations, such as reasoning about information found on the Internet. 

Chinn earned a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked within educational psychology and the learning sciences and has won the Richard E. Snow Award for Early Career Contributions from Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of American Psychological Association. Chinn was the Editor of the journal Educational Psychologist from 2011-2015 and is currently an Editorial Board member of Journal of Educational Psychology, The Journal of the Learning Sciences, The Journal of Experimental Education, and Educational Psychologist.

 

 

About AERA
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.

 

 

To learn more about Dr. Chinn, visit his faculty profile on the GSE website