Director of Technology
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Short Biography – Education – Current Projects – Selected Publications
Short Biography
Boris Goldowsky is responsible for CAST's technology strategy and manages the organization’s system architecture, the design of modules and prototypes, and conducts ongoing research and development in next generation technologies. . He is also CAST’s representative to the standards-setting working group for the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) digital talking book standard and a member of the NIMAS (National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard) Standards Board.
Dr. Goldowsky joined CAST in 2005 with 10 years experience in using technology to facilitate learning and access to information. At Pearson Education, he led the technology team responsible for a family of educationally-focused websites for schools, teachers, parents and students, including FunBrain, TeacherVision, School Cash, and the Family Education Network.
As the head of technology at Information Please LLC, he led the development group responsible for producing a line of almanacs on the Web and built an extensive general-reference website, infoplease.com, around them. Later he led the launch of a companion website, Factmonster.com, a complete reference site for children. He has also consulted in software engineering, information architecture, and adoption of open standards and open-source software.
Education
Ph.D., Psychology and Computer Science/Cognitive Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
M.A., Psychology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
B.S., Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA
Current Projects
UDL Inquiry Science Collaborative – The University of Michigan, the Education Development Center, Inc., and CAST are collaborating in a four year National Science Foundation funded project to support and propel the creation of new kinds of science materials, ones that embody both the principles and practices of high quality science instruction and high quality UDL. We are creating design guidelines for universally designed science materials for middle and high school curricula; a UDL Inquiry Science System (ISS) for creating UDL versions of science curricula for this project and for curricular efforts beyond the project; and we are creating chemistry and biology curriculum exemplars using the ISS and the design guidelines. Examples of the UDL scaffolds and supports provided in the exemplars include: accessibility through text-to-speech, long descriptions and alt text for images, and keyboard-accessible navigation; an interactive work log; multiple response forms including write, audio record, draw, and upload media; just-in-time scaffolding for responses; scaffolding for highlighting critical features; tagging; a multimedia glossary; and support for sustained effort and self-regulation.
UDL Science Notebook – In partnership with the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, CAST is developing and investigating a universally designed, web-based science notebook that supports 4th- and 5th-grade students in learning science. Science notebooks are a common component of activity-based science learning; students use them to emulate the activities of professional scientists by recording, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting data. Yet, for students with disabilities these are often difficult tasks that impede learning. The intervention—including a prototype universally designed science notebook (UDSN), a teacher training module, and a teacher guide—will embody the essential characteristics of traditional science notebooks enhanced by Universal Design for Learning principles and research-validated approaches to support science learning, content area writing, and formative assessment. For the purposes of the research, the Magnetism and Electricity (M&E) module from the Full Option Science System (FOSS), the most widely used hands-on elementary science program, will be the instructional curriculum in which the UDSN is studied.
Urban Ecology Institute – The Boston College Urban Ecology Institute, in partnership with CAST, the University of Arizona, the University of Connecticut, and Northern Illinois University was awarded a NSF Instructional Materials Development Grant to create an ecology curriculum with an urban focus for 11th and 12th grade students. CAST’s role is to create and evaluate an online delivery mechanism for the curriculum which applies the principles of UDL to the curriculum materials, experiments, labs, and action plans students generate while learning about urban ecology.
Selected Publications
Goldowsky, B. N. (1995). Probability matching and maximizing in the learning of a complex non-linguistic system. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester (NY).
Goldowsky, B. N., & Newport, E. L. (1993). Modeling the effects of processing limitations on the acquisition of morphology: The less is more hypothesis. In E. V. Clark, editor, Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual child language research forum. Stanford University. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
