While automated guidance in online units has been found to successfully support learning, students can sometimes feel alienated rather than motivated due to computerized guidance seeming impersonal. In this study, we explore ways to improve learning and motivation by personalizing adaptive guidance. Standard adaptive guidance is compared to more…

In the past 40 years, the proportion of women in science courses and careers has dramatically increased in some nations but not in others. Our research investigated how national differences in women's science participation related to gender-science stereotypes that associate science with men more than women. Data from ~350,000 participants in 66…

Middle school students struggle to explain thermodynamics concepts. In this study, to help students succeed, we use a natural language processing program to analyze their essays explaining the aspects of thermodynamics and provide guidance based on the automated score. The 346 sixth-grade students were assigned to either the critique condition…

Dynamic visualizations can make unseen phenomena such as chemical reactions visible but students need guidance to benefit from them. This study explores the value of generating drawings versus selecting among alternatives to guide students to learn chemical reactions from a dynamic visualization of hydrogen combustion as part of an online inquiry…

To improve student science achievement in the United States we need inquiry-based instruction that promotes coherent understanding and assessments that are aligned with the instruction. Instead, current textbooks often offer fragmented ideas and most assessments only tap recall of details. In this study we implemented 10 inquiry-based science…