Work on the balance with us
We welcome conversations with researchers, schools, and developers who care about what stays physical and what goes digital in learning.
Get in touchStudents learn differently with different tools. Writing by hand, building with materials, and working on screens each shape understanding in their own way — and none of them replaces the others.
We design learning environments where every tool — from pencil to AI — does the work it does best.
Classrooms today hand more and more of learning to screens by default. We ask a quieter question: what does each medium do best? Deciding that with evidence — not by fashion — is how we help all students build the problem-solving skills they use in everyday life.
BDL Lab — Balanced Design for Learning — is a research lab at the Marsal Family School of Education, University of Michigan. We study learning: student learning, teacher learning, and adult learning. Grounded in twenty years of learning-progressions research, our work spans the three places where the choice of medium shapes learning — what learners work with, how they are supported, and how we know they are growing.
Evidence-based curriculum design that keeps hands-on work — paper, worksheets, manipulatives — where it supports learning best, and prints from the same source that powers the digital pipeline.
AI that analyzes student work, spots learning gaps, and returns time to teachers — guiding students with questions rather than answers. A partner, never a replacement for professional judgment.
Learning progressions and AI scoring of handwritten student work, so decisions about physical and digital media rest on measurement — not on intuition or fashion.
Across low-income schools in Alabama, students work on printed, hands-on science materials — writing, drawing, and building by hand. Their work is then read by an AI assessment engine that gives teachers timely insight through a dashboard.
Digital does the authoring, scoring, and feedback. Paper sits in front of the student.
Project partners and team members will be announced.
Dr. Shin researches how people learn — students, teachers, and adults — and designs learning environments that help all learners, especially in STEM, develop the problem-solving skills they use in everyday life. Her work spans conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and technology-integrated learning environments.
For twenty years she has built and validated learning progressions — empirical maps of where learners are — the measurement backbone that lets this lab decide media questions with data.
AI analysis of student answers, feedback generation, and uncertainty estimation for the assessment engine.
Edurix is our education-technology partner in the United States. Edurix turns the lab's research into working systems — the curriculum builder that prints hands-on materials, the AI engine that reads learner work, and the dashboards that carry what it finds back to teachers.
We welcome conversations with researchers, schools, and developers who care about what stays physical and what goes digital in learning.
Get in touch