Rate My Professor Sadhana Puntambekar

Sadhana Puntambekar serves as the Sears-Bascom Professor in the Learning Sciences area within the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the Interactive Design and Learning Lab (ILDL) at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. She earned her PhD in Cognitive and Computing Sciences from the University of Sussex in 1996, an MA in Psychology from Osmania University in 1983—for which she received a gold medal as the top student—and a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from Osmania University in 1981, earning gold medals in both majors and National Merit Scholar recognition. Throughout her career, Puntambekar has led numerous federally funded research projects as Principal Investigator, including NSF DRK-12 grants such as SimSnap: Orchestrating Collaborative Learning in Biology through Reconfigurable Simulations (2020-2024, $1.1 million), Scaffolding Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms through Automated Wise Crowd Analysis of Students’ Writing (2020-2024, $1.4 million), Bio-Sphere: Fostering Deep Learning of Complex Biology for Building Our Next Generation’s Scientists (2014-2018, $2.9 million), and Science Inquiry Using Physical and Virtual Experiments (2014-2018, $1.46 million), among others totaling millions in funding from NSF, IES, and the Gates Foundation.

Puntambekar’s research specializes in the design and implementation of interactive technologies and curricula to scaffold middle school students’ science learning, enabling them to grasp connections between science ideas, central concepts, and networks of relationships rather than discrete facts. Her contributions to scaffolding and Design-Based Research are widely recognized through edited volumes including Handbook of Design in Educational Technology (2012, Taylor & Francis) and Analyzing Interactions in CSCL: Methods, Issues and Approaches (2010, Springer), as well as publications such as “Fading distributed scaffolds: The interplay between teacher and material scaffolds” (Instructional Science, 2019), “Middle school students’ learning of mechanics concepts through engagement in different sequences of physical and virtual experiments” (International Journal of Science Education, 2017), “Design based research: Moving forward” (Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2009), “Tools for scaffolding students in a complex environment: What have we gained and what have we missed?” (Educational Psychologist, 2005), and “Comparing classroom enactments of an inquiry curriculum: Lessons learned from two teachers” (Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2007). She has received the NSF Early CAREER Award (2000), Fellowship in the International Society of the Learning Sciences (2018), and Vilas Associate Award (2020), and held editorial positions as Co-Editor of the American Educational Research Journal (2015-2019) and Associate Editor for the Design-Based Research strand of the Journal of the Learning Sciences.