Vanessa Svihla

University of New Mexico

Alum

Vanessa Svihla is an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. She holds appointments in the Learning Sciences and in the School of Engineering. She received her PhD from The University of Texas at Austin in 2009 in Science Education. She was a post-doctoral scholar on the CLEAR project, where her research interests included understanding how students and teachers might learn from design experiences, and the design of learning experiences that integrate assessment into learning in authentic ways. As part of CLEAR, Vanessa oversaw the analysis of student learning across projects, developed assessments for projects, and in particular, designed the Global Climate Change project. To complement the quantitative methods employed, Vanessa developed case studies of students and teachers using CLEAR projects. Her current research focuses on how people frame design problems and how they learn as they do so.