Louise Yarnall

Senior Research Social Scientist

Louise Yarnall is a Senior Research Social Scientist at the Center for Technology in Learning. She specializes in assessment design, evaluation design, community college education research, and journalism education research.

Her assessment design work is grounded in evidence-centered design and employs SRI's Principled Assessments for Design in Inquiry (PADI) assessment design system. This work involves integrating insights from cognitive science into the design of classroom testing. Using these ideas, Dr. Yarnall develops solutions with a range of applications in classroom instruction and educational administration. Her work has been used for professional development of community college technician educators using problem-based learning curricula. She has developed assessments of both technical knowledge and 21st-century skills in courses ranging from bioinformatics to information technology to engineering. A current research agenda focuses on developing approaches to measure the emergence and development of domain-specific reasoning in post-secondary biology and economics.

Her evaluation design work examines how teachers adapt to new pedagogies and technologies for instruction. This work has focused on how community college educators use problem-based learning in technical education courses and how K-12 educators have used handheld devices to support science inquiry and collaborative learning.

Her journalism education research explores how to use new technology to improve investigative and analytical reporting. This work has involved co-designing instructional materials for a graduate journalism program and conducting an international survey into how journalism professors teach journalistic analytical techniques.

Her graduate training focused on qualitative and statistical methodologies of educational psychology; cognitive and socio-cultural theories of learning, children's literacy, representational fluency, and political development; and technology-based curriculum design. Her professional work in journalism has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism Review. She serves on the steering committee of Public Press, a non-profit journalism startup covering San Francisco.

Education 

Professional Experience 

Research Areas at CTL

Assessment
Evaluation

Current Projects at CTL

Past Projects at CTL

Publications