Sidney D'Mello
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Education Research
Teachers rarely receive detailed, timely feedback on how they teach. What they do get is often infrequent, subjective, and tied to evaluation.
- Fields
Education Research
Computer Science
Psychology
- Topics
teacher professional learning
automated feedback
formative feedback
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Oct 2027
What they work on
- Co-design and iteratively refine automated feedback interfaces for English and language arts teachers with a diverse teacher panel, in partnership with TeachFX, a provider of technology-enabled instructional feedback.
- Build and improve the computational models behind the feedback using TeachFX observations from about 5,000 educators, testing whether they are accurate, unbiased across teacher groups, generalizable, and interpretable.
- Test whether non-evaluative feedback, which withholds judgment and offers teachers choice, drives more professional learning than evaluative feedback, in a longitudinal experiment with 300 teachers.
- Measure teacher responsiveness to automated feedback with observational and survey-based measures, and relate it to teacher empowerment and student achievement outcomes.
More about the research
A core question is whether professionals learn more from feedback that judges their performance or from feedback that simply shows them what happened and lets them decide what to work on. This project tests that question with middle- and high-school English and language arts (ELA) teachers, a setting where weak and unequal literacy outcomes remain a persistent problem in the U.S.
Why it matters
Automated classroom feedback could give every teacher frequent, specific information about their own instruction instead of occasional subjective evaluations. If non-evaluative feedback proves more effective, schools and education technology developers could design tools that genuinely change teaching practice, which may help improve literacy outcomes for middle- and high-school students.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of Colorado Boulder: 36 labs on PI Pages, $718M a year on research, 447 research doctorates a year.
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