Dr. Nitasha is a science educator and learning scientist dedicated to reimagining how children engage with science and STEM more broadly. With a background as a K-8 classroom teacher and curriculum developer, she is passionate about creating playful and engaging science experiences for young learners and supporting teachers to improve their practice towards responsive and adaptive teaching. Her research spans a range of educational topics, including teacher professional development, developing innovative classroom technologies, embodied cognition in learning, and the intersection of these fields with science education. She investigates how various approaches and tools can enhance student engagement and understanding in STEM subjects.
When not immersed in her professional endeavors, she Nitasha finds joy in cooking, reading, and being outside with her son.
I am a researcher in education. I most recently worked with AIR as a full-time researcher, following my work as a postdoctoral researcher at two large research universities. My research projects were funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, through which I provided evidence on effective strategies for teaching and learning in STEM and Computer Science.
My work has both immediate and long-term impact on society. In the short term, I create instruments and provide metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of educational interventions that institutions invest in, along with recommendations for improvement. In the longer term, I use research-driven evidence to build foundational frameworks that improve science teaching. My work contributes to national frameworks for science education, helping make it more equitable and accessible to all students.
I realized early while doing my master's in physics that the questions I gravitated most towards were social questions — particularly, I was learning this concept early of complex systems and asking how learning occurred through complex internet platforms like Wikipedia and Facebook.
So I started on this journey to learn more about education and research. I spent 3 years as a curriculum developer making education more playful and active for K-5 kids in India and then taught 4th grade. I loved working with kids, but I also wanted to know how learning occurs and how to improve the classroom learning experience of my kids.
That brought me to my PhD in America, which I took a whole year to research and apply to. I came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of the same systems thinking that my advisor had and these questions about learning, but I also got to broaden my understanding of the tools and methods of developing and refining instructional materials. With the apprenticing and grueling work learning to read and write articles in the field, I got my PhD specializing in Ed tech for STEM learning and have since taken research roles where I can continue to investigate ways to make STEM learning for equitable and accessible for all children.
There was this one time, years ago, when I worked with a middle school girl and was having her try out this new physics simulation which she was controlling with her hands — this was before this technology was super accessible. She just looked at me and said, "I'm not good at this stuff. I don't do science stuff." I felt so bad because she hadn't even tried the simulation yet, and she touched on a common notion about girls not being good at science. I was so disappointed that she had imbibed that culture at such a young age.
So I reframed the task for her and told her to forget about this as science and just to use her hands to model balls bumping into one another and tell me what would happen. I did this because the simulation was showing molecules (that look like balls anyway) bumping, and also because I was studying how our hands make it easier for us to learn science and mathematics. That simple reframing helped her blossom. She animatedly used her hands to show molecules bumping and wiggling and then got into the simulation and worked with it all the way to the end. She left the interview telling me how much she enjoyed the interview and how she wished all her science classes were like this. I still hold that moment close to my heart, as it is a testament to what research in education can do for children.
I'm going to draw from my experiences as a mom to explain this. They say it takes a village to raise a baby—which is true. The mother isn't the only person needed to care for the baby; countless people are involved. Parents feed and clean the baby, while grandparents and extended family care for the parents. Doctors and nurses monitor the baby's health, and the support system extends far beyond that.
The same holds true for kids in schools. Teachers aren't the only people directly impacting a child's education. There's an entire system of school administrators, counselors, researchers, teacher educators, and data analysts working to improve students' educational experience. Someone needs to create curriculum materials for teachers. Someone needs to distribute these materials to schools. Someone needs to build schools and ensure they're safe learning environments. It's a large, complex system, but all of it feeds into the support structure that educates the child. It's crucial to understand how interconnected this system is—it cannot simply be cut down or replaced by technology.