K12 teachers need a wider range of design approaches to foster feasible qualitative improvements in all students’ schooling experiences. We propose a framework for conceptualizing pre-service teach...

Collaborative learning is widely applied in real-world classrooms while young learners still have challenges engaging in high-quality knowledge co-construction processes. Researchers suggested an i...

Studies of socio-scientific decision-making in times of crisis are in their infancy. This study investigates how minoritized youth engage and make sense of newly developed COVID-19 vaccines and the...

This study builds on posthumanist and new materialist orientations to examine the role of material properties and the gendered identity texts of educational tools as active agents in STEM learning....

Many studies have pointed to the importance of trust and inclusiveness in teachers’ collaborative groups. Here, we investigate how teachers negotiate dividing lines between “us” and “them” in momen...

This paper explores K-12 interdisciplinary learning in the humanities (IL-Humanities), an area that, until now, has seen limited research focus compared to its STEM counterparts. We asked: (1) What...

Course-based research experiences (CBREs) are highly valued for science learning and research. Most are discipline-centered, but there is a great deal of interest in developing them to promote inte...

The importance of engaging students with complex societal challenges has led to the adoption of various interdisciplinary teaching and learning practices in both K-12 and higher education. However,...

In this commentary, I offer my insights from the Special Issue—Beyond disciplinary engagement: researching the ecologies of interdisciplinary learning—which, in my view, reframes interdisciplinarit...

I begin the commentary by identifying some methodological challenges in interdisciplinary learning research and describe how the contributions to the special issue address these. The fact that inte...

Constructing shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems is one of the most challenging aspects of interdisciplinary teamwork. How this process unfolds is under-researched, making it...

Influential philosophers have suggested that interdisciplinarity is crucial for ecosystem management and scientific practice, and for education to democracy. However, a historical review of the ris...

Higher education is expected to prepare students with interdisciplinary learning (IDL), which is important for their educational and working life opportunities. The cocreation of knowledge in inter...

Today’s complex information environment requires effective navigation and analysis of multiple sources to make reliable decisions about complex topics. Learners must enact thinking that reliably le...

Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students’ racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Lati...

To support collaborative drawing, it is essential to investigate how students make collaborative drawings and how these contribute to elaborating their ideas. This study examines how 5th and 6th gr...

Learning scientists have historically been interested in understanding how learning happens and in creating innovations to facilitate learning in real-world situations. Recently, the field has reco...

Dealing with uncertainties is inherent in the engineering design process and often poses challenges for young learners. This necessitates providing learners with adequate support to navigate their ...

Community-based monitoring provides a forum for diverse stakeholders to co-construct knowledge relevant to building social-ecological resilience. However, power asymmetries between these actors can...

Co-design can be challenging and rewarding as educators explore new roles and ideas. Accounts of co-design rarely examine educators’ affective and relational experiences, nor investigate scaffolds ...

“21st century learning” is reliant on not only cognitive competencies such as problem-solving, but also interpersonal (e.g., collaboration) and intrapersonal (e.g., self-regulation) competencies. B...

Emotions are inherently intertwined with learning and disciplinary identity, and this relationship demands that teachers attend and respond to students’ emotions. In this study, we forward a theory...

The ongoing transformation of the interplay between human beings and nature calls for new ways of learning. Although established educational practices merging sciences and arts have been studied be...

Ideologies are socially constructed frameworks for sensemaking that influence teaching and learning. Drawing on Learning Sciences research on ideologies, we explore how an elementary science profes...

When the Learning Sciences emerged in 1991, there was an ethos of studying learning in humans and machines in conjunction with one another. This ethos reflected three decades of prior work on the i...

Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs) in education have been gaining increasing currency and support since well before the advent of COVID-19. This article reflects on what the pandemic experience ...

Natureculture (Fuentes, 2010; Haraway, 2003) constructs offer a powerful framework for science education to explore learners’ interactions with and understanding of the natural world. Technologies ...

Published in Journal of the Learning Sciences (Vol. 32, No. 3, 2023)

ABSTRACT Background The coherence of learners’ pre-instruction conceptions has been debated for some time. Studies on conceptions of force, specifically, have produced very different results in different contexts around the world. In this study, an integrative theoretical framework linking semantic differences across languages to concept learning in childhood is proposed, motivating the hypothesis

Published in Journal of the Learning Sciences (Vol. 32, No. 2, 2023)

ABSTRACT Background This article considers the speculative and pedagogical character of campus abolitionist organizing. Extending education research into the knowledge (re)producing functions of radical activism, we draw upon the Black Radical Tradition to theorize the intersections of learning and imagination in both activism and education. Method The article centers an autoethnographic case study

ABSTRACT Background Scholarship demonstrates that Black girls’ capacities to imagine possible futures in computing are constrained by narratives of white masculinity and misogynoir embedded within computing. Building on race critical code studies and identity-as-narrative theories, we examine restorying through Black womanist storytelling methodologies for integrating Black girls’ intersectional identities

ABSTRACT Background Academic learning in higher education requires diverse activities such as reading, reviewing, and discussion. However, there are relatively few studies on the effect of the combination of these activities on learning outcomes. In this study, we investigated the combination of self-study and discussions at a selective Korean university. Methods The present study compared the two-part

Published in Journal of the Learning Sciences (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Journal of the Learning Sciences (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023)

ABSTRACT Background We examine the development of youth sociopolitical consciousness and agency in an eighth-grade science classroom as students of color engage in critical speculative design activities, exploring the multi-scalar, racial realities and possibilities of the science and engineering of pervasive digital technologies—specifically involving the entanglement of lightwaves and melanin in

ABSTRACT Background In this paper, we extend theories of group cognition and regulation to examine how regulation occurs as part of a learning ecosystem. We examine our instructional approach, Embedded Design, that uses Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as a conduit for students to make sense of their sociotechnical world and the ways people design everyday interaction around technology. Methods Our

Published in Journal of the Learning Sciences (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023)

ABSTRACT Background Long-form dramatic improvisation has been investigated as an accomplishment of emergent creativity among an ensemble of “players,” focusing on how the group achieves “group flow” in performance. Methods This article employs ethnographic methods (focus group, interviews, and video-assisted self-interviews) to investigate the case of a musical theater improv group. The analysis focuses

ABSTRACT Background Pedagogical sensemaking, in which teachers attempt to figure something out in relation to teaching and learning, as a form of generative teacher discourse can provide opportunities for teachers to learn. However, much of the research in these areas examines how teachers reason during sustained collegial discourse outside the classroom. Methods This exploratory case study of one

ABSTRACT Background Everyday digital technologies play an important role in mediating human activity that is socio-political and humanizing. The everyday cyborg engages in speculative fabulation that is about fantastical new world-making in times of multiple crises. The work presented in this article builds on previous projects that have examined how everyday cultural practices mediate consequential

ABSTRACT Background This article explores the methodological foundations for a utopian methodology as a form of Design-Based Intervention Research (DBR) that can guide the process of envisioning, implementing, sustaining, and critically evaluating the more radical forms of educational activity systems that prefigure the utopian goal of an equitable and humane education system. Methods We examine, guided

ABSTRACT Background Makerspaces are proliferating U.S. public schools and libraries. Few studies, however, take an in situ view on the pedagogical moves of mentors, and fewer still engage with ideologies of race and class therein. Without this, principles of pedagogy or design that build toward expansive learning for racially minoritized youth will remain elusive. Methods Semi-structured interviews

ABSTRACT Empirical evidence demonstrates the effect of productive failure (Kapur, 2008) on disciplinary knowledge. However, there is no clear theoretical explanation for why this is the case. Empirical evidence on argumentation and education shows the impact of curricular embedded deliberative argumentation on learning. However, these two trends of research have been mainly isolated, with insufficient

In the context of recent research in science education and continued struggles to understand how best to support science teachers, epistemological frames, made up of sets of epistemological resourc...

ABSTRACT Background Fiber crafts occupy a vital position in technology innovation and present a promising space for computer science education, which continues to face lopsided participation. It remains unclear whether and how fiber crafts can become a context for computational learning and what role different materials play with the risk to miss computational approaches that could broaden computational

ABSTRACT “Learning engineering” has gained popularity as a term connected to the work of learning sciences. However, the nature of that connection is not entirely clear. For some, learning engineering represents distinct, industry-inspired practices enabled by data abundance and digital platformization of learning technologies. That view is presented as one where learning engineers apply learning research

ABSTRACT Background Art making is a personal and social process in which learners make meaning for themselves and audiences through the production of artifacts. In classrooms, this personal and social process is made concrete through dialogue. Methods This paper presents an illustrative case study of how sixth-grade student, Jo, developed voice through interaction with peers in a classroom context

ABSTRACT Background Groupwork is a desirable activity in mathematics classrooms for the opportunity it creates for collaborative reasoning and interdependence. Correlations between group-level processes and outcomes have helped characterize the features of more successful groups, but group-level constructs can obscure how students negotiate ideas. This study investigated how students’ interactions

ABSTRACT Background Calculus instruction is underexamined as a source of racialized and gendered inequity in higher education, despite research that documents minoritized students’ marginalizing experiences in undergraduate mathematics classes. This study fills this research gap by investigating mathematics faculty’s perceptions of the significance of race and gender to calculus instruction at a large

(2022). Learning in and through the arts. Journal of the Learning Sciences: Vol. 31, Learning in and through the arts, pp. 1-13.

(2022). List of Guest Reviewers in 2021. Journal of the Learning Sciences: Vol. 31, Learning in and through the arts, pp. i-v.

ABSTRACT Background Physics is often presented as disembodied, separating learners from opportunities to utilize their bodies as sense-making resources. By ignoring issues of body, ethnicity and culture, these framings limit access to physics for many, including Black girls, who struggle to gain access to physics. Studying the situated, embodied cultural practices of Black girls in physics learning

ABSTRACT Background Museum exhibits encourage exploration with physical materials typically with minimal signage or guidance. Ideally children get interactive support as they explore, but it is not always feasible to have knowledgeable staff regularly present. Technology-based interactive support can provide guidance to help learners achieve scientific understanding for how and why things work and

Abstract Background Studies of group creativity have focused on adults acting in professional settings, with less attention paid to how adolescents collaborate in groups in creative activities. Building on sociocultural perspectives on imagination as a complex capacity in adolescence, this study examines students’ creative-imagining processes and the role of peer influence in group collaboration. Methods

ABSTRACT Background Teachers need to make sense of curricular materials and design instruction to ensure students will be positioned to pursue their own arc of inquiry in curriculum enactment. Whole-group discussions are crucial opportunities for curricular sensemaking, yet planning and enactment can be challenging. Methods We used a single, revelatory case study approach with one focal teacher to

(2022). Creative expansion of knowledge-creating learning. Journal of the Learning Sciences: Vol. 31, Learning in and through the arts, pp. 138-149.

Abstract Background Supporting students during collaborative learning in mathematics is challenging for teachers. We developed the Small-Group Scaffolding Tool (SGS-Tool) to assist teachers regarding how and when to offer support. The tool is based on three characteristics of scaffolding small groups at the group level: contingency to the group, phasing out content support when the group can continue

ABSTRACT Background In studio art, students are expected to be highly agentive—to engage in creative processes to form personalized representations of ideas, yet we lack knowledge on how teachers support their agency. Approaching agency as co-constructed practices across temporal dimensions, we examine how teachers shift between autonomy-supportive and directive approaches, building students’ artistic

ABSTRACT Background The transition to technology-mediated remote schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic represented a drastic shift in educational technologies’ function in K-12 settings. This theoretical paper sought to: (1) identify key developments in technology-use during the pandemic; (2) situate current events within the Learning Sciences’ evolving conceptualizations of educational technologies;