Mark Warschauer
Professor of Education and Informatics
- Irvine CA UNITED STATES
Mark Warschauer is a Professor of Education and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
Media
Social
Biography
Dr. Warschauer is director of the Digital Learning Lab at UC Irvine, where, together with colleagues and students, he works on a range of research projects related to digital media in education. In K-12 education, his team is developing and studying cloud-based writing, examining new forms of automated writing assessment, exploring digital scaffolding for reading, investigating one-to-one programs with Chromebooks, and analyzing use of interactive mobile robots for virtual inclusion. In higher education, his team is looking at instructional practices in STEM lecture courses, the impact of virtual learning on student achievement, the learning processes and outcomes in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and the impact on students of multi-tasking with digital media. The DLL team is also exploring new approaches to data mining, machine learning, and learning analytics to analyze the learning and educational data that result from use of new digital tools.
Dr. Warschauer is author and editor of a wide range of books, including, most recently, Learning in the Cloud: How (and Why) to Transform Schools with Digital Media and Japan: The Paradox of Harmony. He is founding editor of Language Learning & Technology journal and has been appointed inaugural editor of AERA Open. He is active on Twitter @markwarschauer, where he posts on a wide range of professional and personal issues, and occasionally blogs at Papyrus News. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Fellow, American Educational Research Association
2014
Education
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
PhD
Second Language Acquisition
1997
San Francisco State University
MA
English (Teaching English as a Second Language)
1991
Univ. of Calif. at Santa Cruz
BA
Psychology
1975
Affiliations
- Palgrave Macmillan, Digital Education and Learning book series : Editor
- Bloomsbury Academic, Advances in Digital Language Learning and Teaching book series : Editor
- AERA Open : Editor
- L2 Journal : Editorial Board
- Language Learning Journal : Editorial Board
- Language@Internet : Editorial Board
- Writing and Pedagogy : Editorial Board
Links
Media Appearances
Cursive Is Back. But Should Students Be Learning the Skill?
KQED online
2026-03-19
“I have seen no evidence that cursive brings any particular cognitive or learning benefit beyond that brought by hand printing,” wrote Mark Warschauer, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, in an email to NPR. He noted that the cognitive benefits of young students writing by hand in general are already well established.
International students may be among the biggest early beneficiaries of ChatGPT
The Hechinger Report online
2025-04-14
Mark Warschauer is a professor of education at University of California, Irvine, and director of its Digital Learning Lab, where he studies the use of technology in education. … “We often see with new technologies that high-income people get access first, but then it balances out. I believe that low-income people use cell phones and social media as much as high income people in the U.S.,” he said.
How AI can teach kids to write – not just cheat
The Hechinger Report online
2023-10-26
Mark Warschauer, a professor of education [and director of the university’s Digital Learning Lab] at the University of California, Irvine, has spent years studying how technology can change writing instruction and the nature of writing itself. When ChatGPT was released, he decided to tailor some of his research to study ways generative AI could help students and teachers, particularly English language learners and bilingual learners. … Warschauer’s team has also partnered with UC Irvine’s school of engineering to create an intelligent writing coach, to be called PapyrusAI.
Mark Warschauer, University of California, Irvine – Improving Children’s Learning Through Interactive TV Shows
The Academic Minute online
2023-07-10
Kids loving talking to the TV, but what if it talked back to them? Mark Warschauer, professor of education and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, explores how to make characters interact with the kids watching them.
AI and the Future of Writing Instruction
Campus Technology radio
2023-03-29
Mark Warschauer is a professor of education and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and founder of UCI's Digital Learning Lab. We talked about the potential of AI for teaching and learning, overcoming faculty skepticism about AI tools, research questions that should be asked about AI in education, and more.
Research Grants
Investigating Virtual Learning Environments
National Science Foundation
2015-2020
CONECTAR: Collaborative Network of Educators for Computational Thinking for Al
National Science Foundation
2017-2019
CS10K: CS1C@OC—Building a Local Area Network of Computer Science Teachers
National Science Foundation
2016-2019
Digital Scaffolding for English Language Arts
Institute for Education Sciences
2015-2019
Digital Storytelling in the Classroom
DIGICOM and Palm Springs Unified School District
2015-2019:
Articles
What Are You Talking To?: Understanding Children's Perceptions of Conversational Agents
Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsYing Xu, Mark Warschauer
2020
Conversational agents (CAs) available in smart phones or smart speakers play an increasingly important role in young children's technological landscapes and life worlds. While a handful of studies have documented children's natural interactions with CAs, little is known about children's perceptions of CAs. To fill this gap, we examined three- to six-year-olds' perceptions of CAs' animate/artifact domain membership and properties, as well as their justifications for these perceptions. We found that children sometimes take a more nuanced position and spontaneously attribute both artifact and animate properties to CAs or view them as neither artifacts nor animate objects.
"Elinor Is Talking to Me on the Screen!" Integrating Conversational Agents into Children's Television Programming
Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsYing Xu, Mark Warschauer
2020
Science-oriented television and video programming can be an important source of science learning for young children. However, the educational benefits of television have long been limited by children not being able to interact with the content in a contingent way. This project leverages an intelligent conversational agent -an on-screen character capable of verbal interaction-to add social contingency into children's experience watching science videos. This conversational agent has been developed in an iterative process and embedded in a new PBS KIDS science show "Elinor Wonders Why." This Late Breaking Work presents the design of the conversational agent and reports findings from a field study that has proven feasibility of this approach. We also discuss our planned future work to examine the agent's effectiveness in enhancing children's engagement and learning.
Toward the Establishment of a Data‐Driven Learning Model: Role of Learner Factors in Corpus‐Based Second Language Vocabulary Learning
The Modern Language JournalHansol Lee, Mark Warschauer, Jang Ho Lee
2020
We investigated how learner factors, such as vocabulary proficiency, strategy use, and working memory, are associated with successful corpus‐based second language (L2) vocabulary learning, in which learners are encouraged to analyze and explore large, structured collections of authentic language data (i.e., corpora) to resolve their lexical issues (i.e., data‐driven learning [DDL]).
Increasing success in college: Examining the impact of a project‐based introductory engineering course
Journal of Engineering EducationHa Nguyen, Lily Wu, Christian Fischer, Gregory Washington, Mark Warschauer
2020
Project‐based learning has shown promise in improving learning outcomes for diverse students. However, studies on its impacts have largely focused on the perceptions of students and instructors or students' immediate performance. This study reports the impact of taking a project‐based introductory engineering course on students' subsequent academic success.
The benefits and caveats of using clickstream data to understand student self-regulatory behaviors: opening the black box of learning processes
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher EducationRachel Baker, Di Xu, Jihyun Park, Renzhe Yu, Qiujie Li, Bianca Cung, Christian Fischer, Fernando Rodriguez, Mark Warschauer, Padhraic Smyth
2020
Student clickstream data—time-stamped records of click events in online courses—can provide fine-grained information about student learning. Such data enable researchers and instructors to collect information at scale about how each student navigates through and interacts with online education resources, potentially enabling objective and rich insight into the learning experience beyond self-reports and intermittent assessments.