Andrew Ruis

About Me (Bio)
A. R. Ruis is Associate Director of the Center for Research on Complex Thinking, a research scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, and a fellow in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States, as well as numerous articles on the history of food, nutrition, and health; quantitative ethnography, digital humanities, and research methodology; environmental and medical education; and public policy. Dr. Ruis led the development of iPlan, which simulates the impacts of land use on socio-economic and environmental issues in local context, and he has contributed to the development of other learning simulations and analytic tools, including epistemic network analysis. His current projects focus on environmental learning simulation design; modeling multilingual climate change adaptation policies; subgroup fairness in automated text classification; and novel methods for assessing learning and complex thinking in educational simulations.
Citations of DRK-12 or Related Work (DRK-12 work is denoted by *)

*A. R. Ruis, C. Barford, J. Brohinsky, Y. Tan, M. Bougie, Z. Cai, T. J. Lark, & D. W. Shaffer, “iPlan: A Platform for Constructing Localized, Reduced-Form Models of Land-Use Impacts,” Multimodal Technologies & Interaction 8, no. 4 (2024).

University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison)
09/01/2024

Despite the importance of addressing climate change, existing K-12 curricula struggle to make the urgency of the situation personally relevant to students. This project seeks to address this challenge in climate change education by making the abstract, global, and seemingly intractable problem of climate change concrete, local, and actionable for young people. The goal of this project is to develop and test actLocal, an online platform for K–12 teachers, students, and the public to easily create localized climate change adaptation simulations for any location in the contiguous United States. These simulations will enable high school students and others to implement and evaluate strategies to address the impacts of climate change in their own communities.