Lindsey Engle Richland

Higher-order thinking is a key component of science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) reasoning and supports students’ ability to reflect on their ideas, make connections, and generalize across contexts. We report a new approach to the use of generative AI in STEM education, in which we are developing a chatbot that aims to engage students in higher-order thinking, rather than giving instructional content. We describe a proof of concept test of whether interaction with our generative artificial intelligence chatbot could elicit students’ higher-order thinking talk (HOTT) in conversation as they reflected on their solutions to proportional reasoning problems. Thirty-three fifth- and sixth-grade students received a 30-min lesson on symbolic and number line strategies for comparing ratios and completed an assessment following the lesson. Students then engaged in dialog with the UCI Math ThinkBot (afterward Math ThinkBot ) to explain their solutions and compare strategies. These transcripts were examined qualitatively and quantitatively for HOTT, revealing that HOTT appeared in both chatbot prompts and children’s responses—which is important because eliciting student HOTT can be a challenge in classroom discourse. In addition, children’s HOTT was positively associated with the HOTT produced by the chatbot. These findings suggest that human-artificial intelligence dialog can lead to instructional HOTT discourse and may offer a promising approach for supporting higher-order thinking and STEM reasoning.

With the prevalence of digital technologies in the classrooms, educators continue to seek ways to augment traditional in-person teaching with the benefits of educational technologies, utilizing blended learning approaches. This study investigates the role of learning experience design (LXD) in supporting children’s engagement in blended, video-based math lessons on proportional reasoning. The research focuses on operationalizing LXD through the integration of instructional design (ID) techniques to promote situational interest (SI) and prioritize user experience (UX). By combining SI and UX principles, the aim is to foster student engagement in a blended classroom learning environment. The quantitative findings demonstrate significant correlations between students’ situational interests, user experience, and their level of course engagement. The results from the multiple regressions also showed that students’ situational interests and user experience significantly predicted their course engagement. The qualitative analysis highlights three key themes: the positive impact of Learning Experience Design on student engagement, the pedagogical value of employing multiple solution strategies by the teacher, and the influence of the blended course’s user experience on students’ learning journey. These mixed-method results provide practical insights for refining future designs, ensuring sustained active engagement and effective math learning within blended learning environments, and preparing for various instructional modalities, including traditional, online, and blended formats.

As the global economy and sociopolitical, technological, climate, and international trade contexts continue to shift rapidly, educational goals and aims for skilled employment are changing accordingly. Research on the cognition of relational reasoning provides insight into training youth to handle these types of complex systems and multi-faceted problems. Relational reasoning is the ability to make inferences from the relationships within and between mental representations, and grounds many higher order cognitive actions such as generating solutions to novel problems, transferring insights from one context to another, and making creative leaps of inference that are central to these societal aims. This article synthesizes the theoretical and foundational literature to highlight specific practices that are relevant and implementable in enhancing all students’ access to rich and complex thinking and reasoning skills. These include strategies for training students to notice and attend to relational correspondences, to use visual stimuli and language to draw connections, and to reduce the cognitive resources required to do so.

In light of the educational challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing need to bolster online science teaching and learning by incorporating evidence-based pedagogical principles of Learning Experience Design (LXD). As a response to this, we conducted a quasi-experimental, design-based research study involving nN = 183 undergraduate students enrolled across two online classes in an upper-division course on Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at a large R1 public university. The study extended over a period of 10 weeks, during which half of the students encountered low-stakes questions immediately embedded within the video player, while the remaining half received the same low-stakes questions after viewing all the instructional videos within the unit. Consequently, this study experimentally manipulated the timing of the questions across the two class conditions. These questions functioned as opportunities for low-stakes content practice and retention, designed to encourage learners to experience testing effect and augment the formation of their conceptual understanding. Across both conditions, we assessed potential differences in total weekly quiz grades, page views, and course participation among students who encountered embedded video questions. We also assessed students’ self-report engagement, self-regulation, and critical thinking. On average, the outcomes indicated that learners exposed to immediate low-stakes questioning exhibited notably superior summative quiz scores, increased page views, and enhanced participation in the course. Additionally, those who experienced immediate questioning demonstrated heightened levels of online engagement, self-regulation, and critical thinking. Moreover, our analysis delved into the intricate interplay between treatment conditions, learners’ self-regulation, critical thinking, and quiz grades through a multiple regression model. Notably, the interaction between those in the immediate questioning condition and self-regulation emerged as a significant factor, suggesting that the influence of immediate questioning on quiz grades varies based on learners’ self-regulation abilities. Collectively, these findings highlight the substantial positive effects of immediate questioning of online video lectures on both academic performance and cognitive skills within an online learning context. This discussion delves into the potential implications for institutions to continually refine their approach in order to effectively promote successful online science teaching and learning, drawing from the foundations of pedagogical learning experience design paradigms and the testing effect model.

Traditionally, learning among young students has taken place within structured, physical classroom settings. However, the emergence of distance learning has introduced a diverse range of learning methods, including online, hybrid, and blended approaches. When the COVID-19 pandemic led to extended delays in in-person instruction, use of educational technologies such as asynchronous videos and online platforms were deployed to deliver mathematics curricula aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), though best practices for teaching mathematics asynchronously are not well studied. This study focuses on exploring the effectiveness of a math course on proportional reasoning that was co-designed, developed, and deployed in 5th and 6th grade Orange County classrooms. Examining the learning experience design (LXD) paradigm, this research focuses on discerning its influence on (n = 303) children's engagement during their involvement in an online, video-based math course. LXD is implemented by combining evidence-based pedagogical instructional design with human-centered user experience (UX) design. The study utilized a structural equation model to analyze the relationships between learners' user experiences, situational interest, mind-wandering, and online engagement. The results demonstrated significant direct effects between students' situational interest, user experience, and their level of online engagement. Findings also indicate that students' situational interest and mind-wandering significantly mediate the relationship between their user experiences and online engagement. These results have important theoretical and practical implications for researchers, designers, and instructors. By combining evidenced-based pedagogical learning design with human-centered user experience design, LX designers can promote situational interest, reduce mind-wandering, and increase engagement in elementary mathematics courses conducted in asynchronous online settings.

We combine design-based implementation research with a pre-registered RCT to address a long-standing challenge in psychological science: How to use psychological principles to address real-world problems while designing and implementing interventions in the field. We posit this as a design methodology for optimizing the translation between psychological science and real-world applications. We tested the efficacy of an extensively co-designed version of a game-based rational number intervention, Fraction Ball, versus “business-as-usual” math instruction and physical education in a sample of 4th/5th grade Latine students (N=360). Insights from 9 co-design sessions with 20 teachers informed revisions and additions to a previous version of Fraction Ball, strengthening impacts across 10 of 12 rational number subtests. This methodology provides insights for translating psychological science research and scaling it to address real-world educational needs, such as play-based interventions that improve rational number understanding in authentic contexts.

Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its theorized role as an underpinning of, and constraint on, humans’ accomplishment of complex cognitively demanding tasks in the world, such as identifying problems, reasoning about and executing multi-step solutions while inhibiting prepotent responses or competing desires. As EF measures have been continually refined for increased precision; however, they have also become increasingly dissociated from those everyday accomplishments. We posit three implications of this insight: (1) extant measures of EFs that reduce context actually add an implicit requirement that children reason using abstract rules that are not accomplishing a function in the world, meaning that EF scores may in part reflect experience with formal schooling and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) socialization norms, limiting their ability to predict success in everyday life across contexts, (2) measurement of relational attention and relational reasoning have not received adequate consideration in this context but are highly aligned with the key aims for measuring EFs, and may be more aligned with humans’ everyday cognitive practices, but (3) relational attention and reasoning should be considered alongside rather than as an additional EF as has been suggested, for measurement clarity.