Researcher | Data Scientist | Educator | Problem Solver
National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow
Tricia A. Guerrero
"I have an idea!" - Get to know me. You will hear this often.
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I am a researcher and data scientist with 8+ years of experience in quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. I have expertise in understanding how individuals use and process information to make decisions and how they apply information to solve problems.
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In a previous chapter of my life, I had the privilege of working as a culinary arts instructor. This experience taught me an invaluable lesson - the way in which you teach can have a profound impact on how people learn. I often found myself employing innovative strategies to enhance our interactions, the quality of questions they posed, and the way they applied their knowledge moving forward. This desire to explore human behavior fueled my passion to become a researcher with a focus on learning and understanding.
Current Projects
Altering learning outcomes and study behaviors through expectations
What we tell someone before they undertake a new task matters! It can affect not only the outcome but alter how they engage in the task. When individuals were prompted to teach concepts to another person (even when they never actually did it), they paid MORE attention to the important information in the text and they were MORE motivated to engage in the task leading to INCREASED learning.
Supporting comprehension with constructive activities
Teachers all know that the activities that students engage in prior to, during, and after study affect learning. But those affects can happen at different levels of processing. This means that while one activity may be best for testing a student's memory for the information, another may be better when the test is more apt to draw on understanding of the concept as a whole.
Understanding how people apply knowledge in the real-world
Only 2% of graduating high-school students can understand complex materials at the level at which they can apply information in new situations. Recent work has shown that when readers made MORE inferences during reading, their ability to problem solve when presented with new hypothetical situations INCREASED. This works highlights the importance of teaching scientific reasoning for higher-order cognition in education.