Because implementing and orchestrating collaborative problem-based learning (PBL) in K-12 classrooms requires teachers to manage multiple activities and access various teaching resources at the same time, this is an exceptionally complex task for designers to develop tools for orchestration support as well as for teachers to coordinate. The aim of the present study was to explore what classroom teachers perceived to be essential to support orchestration in PBL, but also to surface potential areas of tension between teacher and designer goals through a co-design approach. Thirteen K-12 classroom teachers were interviewed to find out what teachers consider integral to support orchestration in game-based PBL environments. We present the primary features that were identified as essential from the teacher interviews, which include the ability to (1) conduct assessment, (2) intervene and scaffold in different ways, and (3) visualize information. In addition, we discuss the design tensions between the goals of the teachers and designers as we work together on a shared view of what it means to design an intelligent assistant for classroom orchestration and present the design documents with implications.

K-12 students need to become familiar with engineering because 21st-century careers integrate engineering practices across all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. While the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) emphasize learning real science and engineering practices, further work is needed to authenticate engineering for K-12 education. The NGSS are presented in a way that merges a single general practice with a core disciplinary idea and cross-cutting concept. Based on this framing and underlying epistemology, NGSS engineering practices are often implemented as overgeneralized, isolated, and largely context-neutral. Yet, in the STEM workplace, practices are rarely done in isolation from one another. Research is needed to better understand the integrated use of NGSS practices in STEM workplaces in order to make these practices more visible and accessible for use in K-12 classrooms. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 entry-level employees and managers in STEM-intensive workplaces. Using emergent and a priori coding, we identified how NGSS practices and contextual features are situated and connected in the STEM workplace. Our findings suggest that by adding rich contextual features, practices become more interconnected and reflective of authentic engineering in the STEM workplace. This process will enable educators to interpret K-12 engineering standards in an authentic way that supports deep engagement in learning engineering.

In this review, we propose that fiber arts - a wide array of practices that use string, yarn, and fabric to create functional and fine art textiles - present a novel avenue to both explore basic science questions about spatial skills and to design interventions that help children learn spatial skills. First, we outline how fiber arts are applicable to existing theoretical frameworks that aim to organize our understanding of spatial skills and highlight how fiber arts may be particularly relevant for understanding critically understudied non-rigid spatial skills. Next, we review the environmental factors that influence spatial skill development. In the third section of the paper, we review the literature on gender differences in spatial skill performance, as well as intervention approaches that have been taken to close gender gaps. Fourth, we outline how motivational features of fiber arts, specifically the roles of individual choice in goal-setting, and growth-mindset-consistent messages in fiber arts contexts, could contribute to spatial learning. Finally, we suggest several avenues for future research, including leveraging fiber arts materials and techniques to investigate non-rigid mental transformation skills, and designing gender-inclusive fiber-arts-based spatial skills interventions that maintain the motivationally relevant features of fiber arts practices and contexts.

Parents’ beliefs about the importance of math predicts their math engagement with their children. However, most work focuses on mothers’ math engagement with preschool- and school-aged children, leaving gaps in knowledge about fathers and the experiences of toddlers. We examined differences in mothers’ and fathers’ ( N = 94) engagement in math- and non-math activities with their two-year-old girls and boys. Parents reported their beliefs about the importance of math and literacy for young children and their frequency of home learning activities. Parents of sons did not differ in their engagement in math activities from parents of daughters. Mothers reported engaging more frequently in math activities with their toddlers than fathers did, but the difference reduced when parents endorsed stronger beliefs about the importance of math for children. Even at very early ages, children experience vastly different opportunities to learn math in the home, with math-related experiences being shaped by both parent gender and parents’ beliefs.

Introduction: Self-regulated learning (SRL), or learners’ ability to monitor and change their own cognitive, affective, metacognitive, and motivational processes, encompasses several operations that should be deployed during learning including Searching, Monitoring, Assembling, Rehearsing, and Translating (SMART). Scaffolds are needed within GBLEs to both increase learning outcomes and promote the accurate and efficient use of SRL SMART operations. This study aims to examine how restricted agency (i.e., control over one’s actions) can be used to scaffold learners’ SMART operations as they learn about microbiology with Crystal Island, a game-based learning environment. Methods: Undergraduate students (N = 94) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) Full Agency, where participants were able to make their own decisions about which actions they could take; and (2) Partial Agency, where participants were required to follow a pre-defined path that dictated the order in which buildings were visited, restricting one’s control. As participants played Crystal Island, participants’ multimodal data (i.e., log files, eye tracking) were collected to identify instances where participants deployed SMART operations. Results: Results from this study support restricted agency as a successful scaffold of both learning outcomes and SRL SMART operations, where learners who were scaffolded demonstrated more efficient and accurate use of SMART operations. Discussion: This study provides implications for future scaffolds to better support SRL SMART operations during learning and discussions for future directions for future studies scaffolding SRL during game-based learning. Copyright © 2023 Dever, Wiedbusch, Romero, Smith, Patel, Sonnenfeld, Lester and Azevedo.

Young children have informal knowledge of fractions before learning about fraction symbols in school. In the current study, we followed 103 children in the Mid-Atlantic United States from the fall to the spring of first grade to characterize the development of individual differences in early informal fraction knowledge, as well as its relation to other mathematical and cognitive skills. Most children in our sample showed some early fraction knowledge at the beginning of first grade, especially with nonsymbolic fractions and halving, and this knowledge improved over the school year without explicit instruction in fractions. However, there were large individual differences in early fraction knowledge at the start of first grade, which explained significant variance in math achievement at the end of first grade, even when controlling for whole number knowledge and a variety of cognitive skills. Start-of-year whole number knowledge, but not spatial scaling or proportional reasoning, also predicted early end-of-year fraction knowledge. These data can inform activities for learning in the early years to foster both early fraction and integer knowledge in parallel, which may better prepare students for later formal instruction in fractions.

We novelly applied established ecology methods to quantify and compare language diversity within a corpus of short written student texts. Constructed responses (CRs) are a common form of assessment but are difficult to evaluate using traditional methods of lexical diversity due to text length restrictions. Herein, we examined the utility of ecological diversity measures and ordination techniques to quantify differences in short texts by applying these methods in parallel to traditional text analysis methods to a corpus of previously studied college student CRs. The CRs were collected at two time points (Timing), from three types of higher-ed institutions (Type), and across three levels of student understanding (Thinking). Using previous work, we were able to predict that we would observe the most difference based on Thinking, then Timing and did not expect differences based on Type allowing us to test the utility of these methods for categorical examination of the corpus. We found that the ecological diversity metrics that compare CRs to each other (Whittaker's beta, species turnover, and Bray-Curtis Dissimilarity) were informative and correlated well with our predicted differences among categories and other text analysis methods. Other ecological measures, including Shannon's and Simpson's diversity, measure the diversity of language within a single CR. Additionally, ordination provided meaningful visual representations of the corpus by reducing complex word frequency matrices to two-dimensional graphs. Using the ordination graphs, we were able to observe patterns in the CR corpus that further supported our predictions for the data set. This work establishes novel approaches to measuring language diversity within short texts that can be used to examine differences in student language and possible associations with categorical data.

BackgroundSingle-session interventions have the potential to address young people's mental health needs at scale, but their effects are heterogeneous. We tested whether the mindset + supportive context hypothesis could help explain when intervention effects persist or fade over time. The hypothesis posits that interventions are more effective in environments that support the intervention message. We tested this hypothesis using the synergistic mindsets intervention, a preventative treatment for stress-related mental health symptoms that helps students appraise stress as a potential asset in the classroom (e.g., increasing oxygenated blood flow) rather than debilitating. In an introductory college course, we examined whether intervention-consistent messages from instructors sustained changes in appraisals over time, as well as impacts on students' predisposition to try demanding academic tasks that could enhance learning.MethodsWe randomly assigned 1675 students in the course to receive the synergistic mindsets intervention (or a control activity) at the beginning of the semester, and subsequently, to receive intervention-supportive messages from their instructor (or neutral messages) four times throughout the term. We collected weekly measures of students' appraisals of stress in the course and their predisposition to take on academic challenges. Trial-registration: OSF.io; DOI: 10.17605/osf.io/fchyn.ResultsA conservative Bayesian analysis indicated that receiving both the intervention and supportive messages led to the greatest increases in positive stress appraisals (0.35 SD; 1.00 posterior probability) and challenge-seeking predisposition (2.33 percentage points; 0.94 posterior probability), averaged over the course of the semester. In addition, intervention effects grew larger throughout the semester when complemented by supportive instructor messages, whereas without these messages, intervention effects shrank somewhat over time.ConclusionsThis study shows, for the first time, that supportive cues in local contexts can be the difference in whether a single-session intervention's effects fade over time or persist and even amplify. Single-session interventions hold promise as scalable treatments for young people, but their effects sometimes persist and sometimes fade out. We found that an established single-session intervention's effects could be sustained and amplified over time in an introductory college course (n = 1675) by providing brief messages from instructors that supported the intervention message. This study provides evidence for a framework that can explain and predict heterogeneity in the effects of single-session interventions, which will help future researchers and practitioners to shape local environments to sustain the beneficial effects of interventions over time. image

This study examined communal goal mismatch among a large sample of White and LatinX STEM students. Drawing on goal congruity and the cultural mismatch theories, we created a mismatch score, the difference between student perceptions of communal opportunities afforded in STEM and their personal endorsement. We hypothesized that LatinX STEM majors would have significantly higher mismatch levels for communal goals than White students, negatively predicting their sense of belonging and intentions to pursue a STEM career. Results did not support these hypotheses of a linear relationship but supported a curvilinear relationship. Subsequent analyses revealed the importance of differentiating between positive mismatch (i.e., STEM fields afford more communal opportunities than desired) and negative mismatch (i.e., STEM fields afford fewer communal goal opportunities than desired). Differentiating the type of mismatch clarified the pattern of results, and negative mismatch was associated with a reduced sense of belonging and lower intentions to pursue STEM.

This study examined the association between elementary students' (N = 1627; 51.3% girls, ages 4-12) engineering-related ability beliefs (competence), task-value beliefs (interest, importance), and career aspirations. Findings suggest that mean levels of children's engineering-related beliefs did not vary by gender. High levels of competence, interest, and importance beliefs were related to higher engineering-related career aspirations. Findings also revealed that the association of competence and interest with career aspirations was stronger for girls than boys; whereas, the association of importance with career aspirations was stronger for boys than girls. Last, results provide evidence of importance as a moderator of the link between competence and career aspirations, suggesting that there was a stronger positive association between competence and career aspirations under high levels of importance. Against the backdrop of the increasing urgency to teach engineering in elementary schools, this study highlighted the salience of examining children's engineering-related motivational beliefs. The study has practical implications for teachers and school psychologists on promoting inclusive instruction in elementary schools. Specifically, the implications of the results for instructional strategies as well as assessments and interventions in elementary schools are discussed.