First APAT Internal Grant Recipient Announced

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 18, 2013) — Sujin Kim, an associate professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Kentucky, has been chosen to receive UK's first Academic Planning, Analytics and Technologies Internal Grant Award.

Kim, who holds joint appointments in the UK College of Public Health, College of Medicine, and School of Library and Information Science in the College of Communication and Information, will receive $13,000 to pursue her study, titled “An Effectiveness Study of a Personalized Learning Platform for Health Informatics Instruction.”

“Empowering consumers in their abilities to create, seek, retrieve, organize, disseminate, and validate online information is increasingly important for making informed (health care) decisions," Kim said. "However, instructional efforts to advance informatics competency have not been productive for the past years.”

With this context, this project will assess the effectiveness of a self-administered, interactive learning platform that will promote customized learning depending on learners’ skills, knowledge, and behavioral/attitudinal abilities, Kim said. The learners’ abilities will be measured through a self-administered informatics competency scale for adoption in their interactive learning module.

The project will test the learning platform with undergraduate students who are interested in health informatics education. The learning platform will be developed by customizing and hyperlinking existing informatics tools and applications that are accompanied with a list of easily adaptable and interactive tutorials, review quizzes, online discussions, and learning logs and feedbacks to facilitate interactive learning.

Expected outcomes include: a self-administered informatics assessment scale, an online portal containing individual learning materials, and an expansion plan to assess the tool’s effectiveness in health informatics education.

The APAT Internal Grants Program launched in Fall 2012 and was designed to enhance UK's research enterprise by assisting investigators in accelerating their research programs related to learning and technology. With the availability of high-speed analytics, real-time computation can be performed while learners interact with learning systems over the Internet.

In the past decade, the educational technology sector has produced several examples of adaptive learning environments that match learning concepts to the learner’s skill levels and needs. This program is designed to encourage the application of cognitive and non-cognitive models for individualized learning using current adaptive-learning methods or tools.

Prior research on adaptive learning has shown that individual differences in learner cognitive abilities (such as working memory, reasoning, visualization and verbal skills) and non-cognitive factors (such as confidence, motivation, effort, self-efficacy, need for sensation, and cognitive reflection) can both influence learning.

A program goal is to support faculty developing methods for measurably and sustainably improving instructional delivery and learning outcomes for UK undergraduate courses in all content areas. Details on the next competitive cycle will be released in the fall of 2013.