Mark Urban-Lurain head shot

Mark Urban-Lurain, Ph.D.

Associate Professor Emeritus

CREATE for STEM Institute

College of Education

Michigan State University




urban@msu.edu


ORCID 0000-0002-2243-8252

I am now retired but am doing project consultations related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education.

My research interests are in theories of cognition, how these theories inform the design of instruction, how we might best design instructional technology within those frameworks, and how the research and development of instructional technologies can inform our theories of cognition.

In recent years, my research has focused on using a variety of statistical and machine learning techniques to analyze student writing in introductory STEM courses.

I am also interested in preparing future STEM faculty for teaching, incorporating instructional technology as part of instructional design, and STEM education improvement and reform.

My research focused on using technology to support more authentic assessments in undergraduate STEM courses. I founded the Automated Analysis of Constructed Response (AACR) research group to use machine learning to analyze student writing about key STEM concepts.

Teaching

For many years I taught introductory computer science for non-computer science majors. We developed innovative courses using a variety of technologies to help students learn important computing concepts.