Understanding the inner workings of Artificial Intelligence (AI) recommendation systems may benefit children in becoming more sensible consumers of the ever-growing information in their daily lives. It may further enable deeper reflections on related ethical issues such as the filter bubble. With limited prior knowledge in math and computing, children often find AI concepts overly abstract. Inspired by optical computation, we propose a novel tangible interface, OptiDot. Through exploratory manipulation with light beams, OptiDot supports children in learning the dot product—a building block for numerous AI algorithms—and AI recommendations through embodied learning experiences. Findings of a preliminary user study with ten middle school students indicate the effectiveness of the key embodied metaphors. We also discuss the design implications and challenges of developing optical-inspired learning tools for children.

Students with strong metacognitive skills are positioned to learn and achieve more than peers who are still developing their metacognition. Yet, many students come to college without well-developed metacognitive skills. As part of a longitudinal study on metacognitive development, we asked when, why, and how first-year life science majors use metacognitive skills of planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Guided by the metacognition framework, we collected data from 52 undergraduates at three institutions using semi-structured interviews. We found that first-year students seek study recommendations from instructors, peers, and online resources when they plan their study strategies. First-year students struggle to accurately monitor their understanding and benefit when instructors help them confront what they do not yet know. First-year students evaluate the effectiveness of their study plans at two specific points: immediately after taking an exam and/or after receiving their grade on an exam. While first-year students may be particularly open to suggestions on how to learn, they may need help debunking myths about learning. First-year students acknowledge they are still learning to monitor and welcome formative assessments that help them improve the accuracy of their monitoring. First-year students may be primed to receive guidance on their metacognition at the points when they are most likely to evaluate the effectiveness of their study strategies and plans. Based on our results, we offer suggestions for instructors who want to support first-year students to further develop their metacognition.

Several widely used high school biology texts depart from established science

Traditional professional development (PD) often focuses solely on skills and knowledge, without explicitly attending to participants' sense of community. In this instrumental case study, we explore the impact of a community-building PD experience on an Emerging Discipline-Based Education Researcher's (EDBER's) sense of community. We center the experiences of one tenure-track faculty member, James (a pseudonym), who participated in a Professional Development for Emerging Education Researchers field school for EDBERs, an example of PD that intentionally attends to building community around research. We find that the PD experience contributed to building James' lasting of community in education research, and we call for more PD to shift towards being simultaneously skills-focused and community-focused.

This study investigated relationships between online learners' self-reported attentional and cognitive states, cognitive load, situational engagement, and learning gains from a multimedia instructional module on Newton's second law. Students (N=896) estimated time spent in four states: on-screen/on-task, off-screen/on-task, onscreen/off-task (mind wandering), and off-screen/off-task. Most time was spent on-screen/on-task (62.4%). Mind wandering time negatively correlated with engagement, germane load, and learning gains. On-task time positively correlated with engagement and germane load, but off-screen/on-task time unexpectedly negatively related to germane load. Off-task time correlated negatively with engagement/germane load and positively with extraneous load. However, no attentional state significantly predicted learning gains besides mind wandering's negative impact. Self-reports revealed relationships generally aligning with cognitive load theory, though some findings differed from expectations. The results underscore examining attentional-cognitive states' influence on cognitive load, engagement, and multimedia learning outcomes.

The perceptions that physics mentors have about disability in physics influences how they interact with their mentees, and negative biases against disability can influence students to feel discouraged within the physics community. We administered the Disability and Physics Career Survey (DPCS) through physics-specific listservs and at physics-specific conferences to measure practicing physicists' knowledge about disability and their beliefs about the viability of physics careers for individuals with a variety of disability diagnoses. This study uses Cochran's Q and McNemar's R to compare how practicing physicists' perceptions of the viability for the careers of teacher and professor depend on the impairment that an individual is diagnosed with. We find that practicing physicists view these careers as non-viable for those with cognitive impairments and hold other unconscious biases that we outline and interrogate.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is a cognitive and metacognitive process through which students develop the self-awareness necessary to direct their learning based on their needs to reach a desired outcome. Despite 40 years of literature, SRL has no singular definition, as it is often used in domain-specific research that is not always transferable to other fields. Regardless, much of the literature speaks to the importance of SRL regarding academic success. This paper details the development of an SRL instrument designed to identify key self-regulatory constructs in an undergraduate introductory physics classroom. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a four-factor model measuring Planning, Time & Environment Management, Comprehension Monitoring & Evaluation, and Peer Learning & Help-Seeking as unique facets of self-regulated learning. While most behaviors did not significantly evolve over one semester, students reported significantly lower scores on the Comprehension Monitoring & Evaluation factor between the beginning and end of the semester. Higher performing students, as measured by their average homework grades, scored significantly higher on the Time & Environment Management factor and the Peer Learning & Help-Seeking factor at both time points. Additionally, SRL behaviors were significantly predicted by personality facets from the Big Five Inventory, with Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Openness being the most related to certain behaviors.

Studies of homesigns have shed light on the human capacity for language and on the challenging problem of language acquisition. The study of homesign has evolved from a perspective grounded in gesture studies and child development to include sign language linguistics and the role of homesigns in language emergence at the community level. One overarching finding is that homesigns more closely resemble sign languages used by linguistic communities than they resemble the gestures produced by hearing people along with spoken language. Homesigns may not exhibit all of the linguistic properties of community languages, but the properties they do exhibit are language properties, and for the people who use them, homesigns are their language. Further, the linguistic structures in homesigns are innovated by the deaf people who use them and are imperfectly learned by their hearing communication partners. I close with a call to action: We cannot celebrate discoveries about the mind made possible by studies of homesigns and emerging languages while ignoring the pervasiveness of language deprivation among deaf people, and the relative lack of deaf participation in science, even in studies of sign languages. While the scientific community learns much from studying homesigns and sign languages, we also have a responsibility to work toward ensuring that every deaf person has access to language, communication, and education.

Background: Interdisciplinarity is often hailed as a necessity for tackling real-world challenges. We examine the prevalence and impact of interdisciplinarity in the NSF ADVANCE program, which addresses gender equity in STEM. Methods: Through a quantitative analysis of authorship, references, and citations in ADVANCE publications, we compare the interdisciplinarity of knowledge produced within the program to traditional disciplinary knowledge. We use Simpon's Diversity Index to test for differences across disciplines, and we use negative binomial regression to capture the potential influences of interdisciplinarity on the long-term impact of ADVANCE publications. Results: ADVANCE publications exhibit higher levels of interdisciplinarity across three dimensions of knowledge integration, and cross-disciplinary ties within ADVANCE successfully integrate social science knowledge into diverse disciplines. Additionally, the interdisciplinarity of publication references positively influences the impact of ADVANCE work, while the interdisciplinarity of authorship teams does not. Conclusions: These findings emphasize the significance of interdisciplinarity in problem-oriented knowledge production, indicating that specific forms of interdisciplinarity can lead to broader impact. By shedding light on the interplay between interdisciplinary approaches, disciplinary structures, and academic recognition, this article contributes to programmatic design to generate impactful problem-solving knowledge that also adds to the academic community. © 2024 The Authors. Social Science Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Southwestern Social Science Association.