Collaborative Problem Solving(CPS) skills are increasingly needed for the future of work. However, most programs do not offer opportunities for students to develop such skills. A recent assessment of students’ ability to solve problems collaboratively showed a significant global deficit. Previous research suggests that virtual agents are a promising tool for providing training on interpersonal skills, which is a crucial aspect of CPS. We believe that virtual agents can be adapted to teach specific CPS skills. However, there are still unanswered questions about the effectiveness of using virtual agents to train individuals on CPS, particularly in relation to teaching specific interpersonal skills. In this paper, we demonstrate how virtual agents can be used to teach the CPS skill of negotiation effectively. To do this, an online course was created using virtual agent based role-playing partners to teach the CPS skill of negotiation. Results show that participants who received instruction and feedback were able to think more globally about the negotiation and shift from focusing on improving outcomes of one issue towards making trade-offs across other issues of interest. These findings suggest that virtual agents have promise for teaching CPS skills. Our approach could be extended to teach other specific CPS skills using virtual agents. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Modern education stands to greatly benefit from technological advances, especially in Artificial Intelligence (AI), that aim to enable effective and personalized learning for all students. However, to improve learning for the majority of students, AI solutions may exclude those who are under-represented due to unique differences in their demographic background or cognitive abilities. Towards combating this issue, we propose a workshop that will initiate conversations about equity, diversity, and inclusion in educational technology research and development. The workshop invites papers from the AIED community about equitable and inclusive educational technology that supports diverse populations, with selected authors being invited to present their work. The workshop is structured around three stages of learning engineering - system design, experimental study, and data analysis - with informational presentations, guest speakers, paper presentations, and group discussions relevant to each stage. Through the participation of community members from multiple disciplines, we seek to formulate a framework for developing and assessing equitable and inclusive educational technology. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Black males’ collegiate experiences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are gaining traction in the research literature. In this work, scholars are utilizing asset-based approaches to examine Black males’ experiences in STEM. Asset-based orientations are also being extended to work on, for, and with Black families. Of utmost importance with respect to this article, Black fathers play a significant role in their sons’ lives. Thus, considerable attention should be paid to the father-son dyad by practitioners and researchers. This case study examines ten Black male STEM majors’ perspectives about their Black fathers. The findings reveal that these Black males described their Black fathers as role models and STEM champions with regard to their STEM pursuits. Recommendations for practice and future research are discussed to advance father-friendly work and ultimately broaden the participation of Black males in STEM. © 2023 by Begell House.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to enhance divergent and convergent creative thinking. Yet, how stimulation impacts creative performance over time, and what cognitive mechanisms underlie any such enhancement, remain largely unanswered questions. In the present research, we aimed to (1) verify the impact of DLPFC tDCS on both convergent and divergent thinking, and further investigated (2) the temporal dynamics of divergent thinking, focusing on the serial order effect (i.e., the tendency for ideas to become more original and less frequent over time), and (3) any role that cognitive inhibition may play in mediating any effect of stimulation on creative thinking (considering the DLPFC's involvement in driving inhibitory processes that are also relevant for creative thinking). In a within-subjects design, twenty-six participants received three types of cross-hemispheric tDCS stimulation over the DLPFC (left cathodal and right anodal, L-R+; left anodal and right cathodal, L+R-; and sham). Before stimulation, they completed a pre-flanker task measuring cognitive inhibition; during stimulation, they completed the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), Remote Associates Test (RAT), and post-flanker task. Results showed that, compared with the sham stimulation, originality of responses in the AUT was significantly enhanced in the L+R- condition, while no tDCS effect was observed for the RAT. Additionally, compared with the other stimulation conditions, we found a diminished serial order effect in the L+R- condition characterized by an accelerated production of more original ideas. Critically, the L+R- condition was accompanied by better performance on the flanker task. Our findings thus verify that L+R- tDCS over the DLPFC accelerates idea originality also providing tentative clues that inhibition may act as a cognitive mechanism underlying enhancements in divergent thinking resulting from frontal lobe neuromodulation.

Rigorous and interactive class discussions that support students to engage in high-level thinking and reasoning are essential to learning and are a central component of most teaching interventions. However, formally assessing discussion quality ‘at scale’ is expensive and infeasible for most researchers. In this work, we experimented with various modern natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically generate rubric scores for individual dimensions of classroom text discussion quality. Specifically, we worked on a dataset of 90 classroom discussion transcripts consisting of over 18000 turns annotated with fine-grained Analyzing Teaching Moves (ATM) codes and focused on four Instructional Quality Assessment (IQA) rubrics. Despite the limited amount of data, our work shows encouraging results in some of the rubrics while suggesting that there is room for improvement in the others. We also found that certain NLP approaches work better for certain rubrics. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

For decades, researchers have struggled with measurement problems related to the construct validity of divergent and convergent thinking in creativity assessments. In response, some have called for battery-based approaches. Recently, digital games have emerged as a potential alternative, offering increased scalability and improved ecological validity. This article presents CREA: a new, scalable, game-based assessment suite. CREA includes crea.tiles and crea.blender, non-verbal games featuring both divergent and convergent thinking modes, as well as crea.ideas - the Alternative Uses Task, a standard test of divergent thinking, and crea.logic - a test of abstract reasoning. The novel convergent and divergent thinking game modes are constructed within the same contextual environment and with theoretically motivated differences in game-prompts to understand and generalize from the emerging elicited behaviors. In this study, 408 participants completed the CREA suite and selected validation measures, representing the largest game-based validation study to date. Both convergent and discriminant validity is demonstrated for crea.tiles with respect to standard tests, with correlations ranging from r = .1-.4. Having CREA freely accessible, we aim to broaden the accessibility of creativity assessment to researchers, educators, and the general public and through this scaleup validate the rich creative behavioral patterns observed in this study. Plain Language SummaryCreative thinking is an essential attribute for success in the 21st century, yet it is difficult to measure because it is complex and contextual. Traditional pen and paper tests of creative thinking are the status quo and are backed up by years of research; however, there are well-known issues with these tests such as (1) they are difficult to scale up, as they require expert human-raters to evaluate the responses; (2) many of them are verbal, which is not necessarily fair within a culturally and linguistically diverse population; and (3) there are still fundamental open questions about what they actually measure. Digital, game-based creativity assessments represent an emerging alternative to conventional creativity tests, presenting the potential for increasing scalability and improving the quality of the results. This article presents CREA: a new, scalable, suite of game-based assessments. CREA includes crea.tiles and crea.blender - non-verbal games featuring several game modes, as well as crea.ideas - a standard test of divergent thinking, and crea.logic - a test of abstract reasoning. Participants (n=408) were university students from North America. They completed the CREA suite and a series of validation measures. The results from the study indicate that the current, freely accessible, version of the CREA suite demonstrated sufficient validity to be used by researchers and practitioners as a scalable, creativity assessment instrument for automated figural assessment of divergent and convergent thinking.

Existing research has consistently supported a relationship between creative achievement and specific personality traits (e.g. openness to experience). However, such work has largely focused on univariate associations, potentially obscuring complex interactions among multiple personality factors, rendering an incomplete picture of the creative personality. We applied a psychometric network approach to characterize the multidimensional personality structure of highly creative individuals in the arts (artists) and sciences (scientists), using data from three samples (N = 4,015): college students, a representative adult sample, and the Big-C project of eminent creative professionals. Replicating past work, we found that artists showed reliably higher levels of openness to experience compared to scientists and a control group of less creative people. Psychometric network analysis revealed that artists were characterized by higher connectivity (i.e. co-occurrence) with other personality traits for openness, indicating that openness may be more heterogeneous in how it co-occurs with other personality traits in highly creative people. Across all three samples, we found that the scientists' personality network structure was more cohesive than the personality network of artists and the control group, indicating greater homogeneity in the personality characteristics of scientists. Our findings uncover a constellation of traits that give rise to creative achievement in the arts and sciences.

Game-based learning offers rich learning opportunities, but open-ended games make it difficult to identify struggling students. Prior work compares student paths to a single expert's golden path. This effort focuses on efficiency, but additional pathways may be required for learning. We examine data from middle schoolers who played Crystal Island, a learning game for microbiology. Results show higher learning gains for students with exploratory behaviors, with interactions between prior knowledge and frustration. Results have implications for designing adaptive scaffolding for learning and affective regulation.

Health behaviors that do not effectively prevent disease can negatively impact psychological wellbeing and potentially drain motivations to engage in more effective behavior, potentially creating higher health risk. Despite this, studies linking moral foundations (i.e., concerns about harm, fairness, purity, authority, ingroup, and/or liberty) to health behaviors have generally been limited to a narrow range of behaviors, specifically effective ones. We therefore explored the degree to which moral foundations predicted a wider range of not only effective but ineffective (overreactive) preventative behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, participants from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States reported their engagement in these preventative behaviors and completed a COVID-specific adaptation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire during the pandemic peak. While differences occurred across countries, authority considerations consistently predicted increased engagement in both effective preventative behaviors but also ineffective overreactions, even when controlling for political ideology. By contrast, purity and liberty considerations reduced intentions to engage in effective behaviors like vaccination but had no effect on ineffective behaviors. Study 2 revealed that the influence of moral foundations on U.S participants' behavior remained stable 5-months later, after the pandemic peak. These findings demonstrate that the impact of moral foundations on preventative behaviors is similar across a range of western democracies, and that recommendations by authorities can have unexpected consequences in terms of promoting ineffective-and potentially damaging-overreactive behaviors. The findings underscore the importance of moral concerns for the design of health interventions that selectively promote effective preventative behavior.

This study addresses the challenge of ensuring the alignment of educational materials with the objectives of public education guidelines outlined in official documents. In Japan, “Courses of Study (COS),” issued by the government, provides a detailed outline for curricula in public and private education. Teachers ought to design lessons based on this outline. This can be a time-consuming and challenging task, particularly. Accordingly, this paper proposes a new support system for designing curricula that performs an automatic search of parts of COS corresponding to teaching materials. Computational retrieval via advanced deep transfer learning methods such as BERT and DeBERTa is expected to be effective and time-saving in the implementation of COS. Using a novel dataset linking textbook text with the COS, the proposed method annotates relevant sections of the COS. Experimental results showed that the proposed method could present the corresponding sections of the COS with a statistically significantly higher mean average precision (mAP) in both unsupervised and supervised learning compared to methods that do not consider semantic factors, such as edit distance. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.