Barany receives grant from National Science Foundation

Deborah Barany, PhD, assistant professor of neuroscience & regenerative medicine at the Medical Partnership, has received a three-year grant totaling more than $730,000 from the National Science Foundation.

Barany is a co-investigator working alongside Logan Firoella, PhD, an associate professor in the Mary Frances Early College of Education. Peggy Brickman, PhD, a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, works with the team as a project consultant, and Ann Seliger, a medical illustrator at the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine, is helping create the study materials for the project. A host of undergraduate and graduate students are also assisting the team with research.

The project’s title is Neural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Instructor Drawing in STEM Learning, and it explores the benefits students gain from watching a professor illustrate during a lecture.

“Dr. Fiorella and others have convincingly shown that students in STEM typically learn better when they can watch an instructor draw diagrams by hand. However, we still don’t really know why watching an instructor draw is effective, nor do we know how much drawing is needed to be most beneficial,” said Barany. “Luckily, we can leverage approaches from cognitive neuroscience to help answer these questions systematically. In particular, part of the project will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to resolve competing theories about how two distinct brain networks, those for attentional guidance and action observation, may uniquely contribute to learning from watching someone draw.”

This project is also special to Barany because not only are she and Fiorella partners in science, but they are also married. Barany said even though this is the first time she has worked with her spouse on a research endeavor of this scale, they have been thinking about tackling a project with this subject matter for a while.

“It’s exciting to have the opportunity to pursue an idea we’ve been developing for quite some time,” said Barany. “This grant is particularly exciting because it allows us to tie together multiple interrelated, but previously unexplored research questions and methods.”

Barany and Fiorella have begun piloting the study materials and collecting data for the first of a series of proposed experiments. Barany said she is enthusiastic about this project because there will be more to learn beyond the scope of the current grant, such as informing potential brain-based interventions or other evidence-based strategies to augment student learning.