Cindy Hmelo-Silver
Associate Professor,
Graduate School of Education,
Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
Cindy Hmelo-Silver is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Studies from Vanderbilt University and served postdoctoral fellowships at Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center. Her research interests include problem-based learning, collaborative knowledge construction, particularly in the area of complex systems, computer-supported collaborative learning, and software-based scaffolding. Her recent projects have created conceptual frameworks and learning environments that are grounded in the learning sciences and have involved both adult learners and children in a variety of contexts ranging from medical education and teacher education to middle school science and math.
She is associate editor of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching and is incoming co-editor of the Journal of the Learning Sciences. She has written numerous articles and has co-edited books entitled Problem-based learning: A research perspective on learning interactions (2000) with Dorothy Evensen and Collaborative Learning, Reasoning, and Technology (2006) with Angela O’Donnell and Gijsbert Erkens. She received awards for Best Paper by a New Investigator from the AERA Division I for her dissertation research on PBL, and a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral fellowship for studying collaborative knowledge building in problem-based learning and how that is facilitated.