David Edward Pritchard (born October 15, 1941)[2] is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who specializes in atomic physics and educational research.
He employed both laser and radio-frequency spectroscopy to study weakly bound van der Waals molecules, such as NaNe[3] and KAr,[4] in cold supersonic molecular beams.
In 1998, David Pritchard and his son Alex developed an online Socratic tutor, mycybertutor.com, which provides specific critiques of incorrect symbolic answers, hints upon request, and follow-up comments and questions.
This tool has been shown to significantly improve students' ability to answer traditional MIT examination problems, increasing their performance by approximately 2 standard deviations.
Pritchard's education research group, RELATE[17] was started in 2000 with the goal to "Apply the principles and techniques of science and engineering to study and improve learning, especially of expertise".
They showed that copying online homework is by far the best predictor of a low final exam grade in MIT residential physics,[16] and is the dominant contributor to ~ 5% of the certificates given by edX.
[18][19] These experiments, along with other relevant research, indicated an important principle that students were struggling with – strategic thinking – the ability to determine which concepts and procedures are helpful in solving an unfamiliar problem.
For this purpose, RELATE developed a Mechanics Reasoning Inventory[20] that measures strategic ability; it served as a benchmark of progress for their new pedagogy: Modeling Approach to Problem-Solving.