Roy D. Pea

Stanford University | SU · Graduate School of Education

In societies increasingly entangled with algorithms, our choices are constantly influenced and shaped by automated systems. This convergence highlights significant concerns for individual autonomy in the age of data-driven AI. It leads to pressing issues such as data-driven segregation, gaps in accountability for algorithmic decisions, and the infr...

Background Youth sports coaches play a critical role in proper concussion recognition and management, reinforcing the need for coach concussion education. As of 2021, most states have statutory and policy measures mandating concussion education for coaches. In practice, these mandates have been enacted through state legislatures and their respectiv...

Background Concussions are mild traumatic brain injuries that are often undiagnosed due to difficulties in identifying symptoms. To minimize the negative sequelae associated with undiagnosed concussion, efforts have targeted improving concussion reporting. However, knowing more about concussions does not indicate how likely an athlete is to report...

Online programming videos, including tutorials and streamcasts, are widely popular and contain a wealth of expert knowledge. However, effectively utilizing these resources to achieve targeted learning goals can be challenging. Unlike direct tutoring, video content lacks tailored guidance based on individual learning paces, personalized feedback, an...

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit dynamic capabilities and appear to comprehend complex and ambiguous natural language prompts. However, calibrating LLM interactions is challenging for interface designers and end-users alike. A central issue is our limited grasp of how human cognitive processes begin with a goal and form intentions for executing...

Mental health is a crisis for learners globally, and digital support is increasingly seen as a critical resource. Concurrently, Intelligent Social Agents receive exponentially more engagement than other conversational systems, but their use in digital therapy provision is nascent. A survey of 1006 student users of the Intelligent Social Agent, Repl...

Mental health is a crisis for learners globally, and digital support is increasingly seen as a critical resource. Concurrently, Intelligent Social Agents receive exponentially more engagement than other conversational systems, but their use in digital therapy provision is nascent. A survey of over 1000 student users of the Intelligent Social Agent,...

This chapter reflects on the contributions of different articles of the book from various perspectives. Seven categories provide perspectives to reflections. Four of them are connected to different levels of the educational system, others opening scenarios to research on education and learning with AI, and finally the last category is devoted to et...

The introduction chapter focuses on the main questions of the whole book AI in Learning: Designing the Future: (1) How is learning changing when human learning and machine learning are connected and what consequences does this conjunction have for education, also for working life as lifelong learning and (2) what kind of ethical issues are emerging...

“Ubiquitous AI”—embodied in cloud computing web services, coupled with sensors in phones and the physical world—is becoming infrastructural to cultural practices. It creates a surveillance society. We review the capabilities of four core surveillance technologies, all making headway into universities and PreK-12 schools: (1) location tracking, (2)...

The interaction capabilities of Intelligent Social Agents, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence, are eliciting deep emotional bonding with users, leading researchers to reexamine the impact and potential uses of these human-machine relationships in education. In this work, we examine how one best-in-class ISA, Replika, might be affe...

Humans are social animals living in societies with most of their activities occurring in social settings, characterized by multiple actors, the crossing of individual behavioral paths, interactions between participants themselves and between participants and material (or immaterial) setting components. We theorize that virtual conferences, like phy...

Undiagnosed concussions increase the risk of additional concussion and persistent symptoms from concussion. Because there are no reliable objective markers of concussion, self-reporting of subjective and non-visible symptoms are critical to ensuring proper concussion management. For this reason, educational interventions target concussion reporting...

Theories of learning developed in education and psychology for the past 100 years are woefully inadequate to support the design of schools and classrooms that foster deep learning and equity. Needed is learning theory that can guide us in creating schools and classrooms where deep learning occurs, where learners’ full selves are engaged, and that d...

Undiagnosed concussions increase risk of additional injuries and can prolong recovery. Because of the difficulties recognizing concussive symptoms, concussion education must specifically target improving athlete concussion reporting. Many concussion education programs are designed without significant input from athletes, resulting in a less enjoyab...

Context: Concussion underreporting leads to delays in diagnosis and treatment, prolonging recovery time. Athletes' self-report of concussion symptoms therefore reduces risk. Objective: Evaluate the efficacy of three concussion education programs in improving concussion-reporting intention. Design: Randomized controlled clinical trial with asse...

The COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest offer an opportunity to clarify what learning is and rethink how to design and assess a “good” school. Schools — online, hybrid, or in-person — should foster learning for all students. Yet, too often, schools paradoxically act as both drivers of equity and reproducers of inequities, both inviting and foreclos...

We describe the emergence of the interdisciplinary learning sciences field and its consequential transformations, drawing on experiences that brought us together. Starting with our undergraduate years, the account culminates with the formation of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). We identify six themes shaping the emergence...

What principles should guide the design of progressive, adaptable, distributed digital STEM learning environments that can personalize learning for diverse learners in individual and collaborative settings across multiple and varying domains of knowledge, learner interests, formal and informal contexts and time spans? This paper articulates six bro...

This year on March 12, 2019, Mike Eisenberg passed away—an enormous loss for the learning arts and sciences community. A computer scientist by vocation, a writer with passionate insights, and a maker at heart, he was an endearing one of a kind. He spent his professional career at the University of Boulder in Colorado, where he established the Craft...

“Technology” is lately equated with hardware and software, but for the Ancient Greeks, a technology combined two linked features: the doing of an art/craft (techne) and theorizing about the doing (technologia). We thus consider a “technology” as a “sociotechnical system” – an entanglement of humans with one another, the tools, arts, crafts, practic...

Across four studies, two controlled lab experiments and two field studies, we tested the efficacy of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) as an education medium for teaching the consequences of climate change, particularly ocean acidification. Over 270 participants from four different learning settings experienced an immersive underwater world designed t...

This paper describes a promising methodology for studying co-located groups: mobile eye-trackers. We provide a comprehensive description of our data collection and analysis processes so that other researchers can take advantage of this cutting-edge technology. Data were collected in a controlled experiment where 27 student dyads (N = 54) interacted...

Digital media, such as interactive video, games, and immersive worlds, offer rich visual perspectives, often allowing one to experience events through another's eyes. While prior research indicates that considering alternative perspectives facilitates understanding, little is known about how media-enhanced perspectives affect learning processes for...

In this chapter we present the results of an eye-tracking study on collaborative problem-solving dyads. Dyads remotely collaborated to learn from contrasting cases involving basic concepts about how the human brain processes visual information. In one condition, dyads saw the eye gazes of their partner on the screen; in a control group, they did no...

In this study, we investigated the way users memorize, analyze, collaborate, and learn new concepts on a Tangible User Interface (TUI). Twenty-seven pairs of apprentices in logistics (N = 54) interacted with an interactive simulation of a warehouse. Their task was to discover efficient design principles for building storehouses. In a between-subjec...

As computer science (CS) thunders its way into K-12 classrooms, lack of teachers to teach CS and pedagogically sound computing curricula remain significant challenges. This paper describes a design-based research (DBR) approach to create and refine a 7-week middle school introductory CS course—Foundations for Advancing Computational Thinking (FACT)...

In this paper, we describe research conducted around a 7-week curriculum designed to introduce middle school students to computer science with a focus on algorithmic thinking and programming. The pedagogical ideas employed in this curriculum were drawn from past research. Empirical investigations over two studies in a public middle school in the US...

The temptation to constantly refer to the web, or lifelog every event, or wear a watch (or other personal device) that connect you with the pulse of available information is strong. But is it a good idea to be that much online? Our panelists will address this question, each presenting a short opening statement about why their position (pro or con)...

This volume offers a historical and critical analysis of the emerging field of the learning sciences, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and improving how children and adults learn. It features a wide range of authors, including established scholars who founded and guided the learning sciences through the initial turbulence...

In a previous study, we found that real-time mutual gaze perception (i.e., being able to see the gaze of your partner in real time on a computer screen while solving a learning task) had a positive effect on students’ collaboration and learning (anonymous for blind review). The goals of this paper are to: 1) explore a variety of computational techn...

As K-12 educators move to introduce computing curricula, the issue of assessing student learning of computational concepts remains largely unresolved. This is central, however, if the goal is to help students develop deeper, transferable computational thinking (CT) skills that prepare them for success in future computing experiences. This paper arg...

The focus of this research was to create and test an introductory computer science course for middle school. Titled “Foundations for Advancing Computational Thinking” (FACT), the course aims to prepare and motivate middle school learners for future engagement with algorithmic problem solving. FACT was also piloted as a seven-week course on Stanford...

The present invention provides electronic methods and apparatus for interactively authoring, sharing and analyzing digital video content. Methods for authoring include displaying visual data, defining each traversal as a time-based sequence of frames and annotating and storing a record of the traversal and its associated audio records. Defining the...

We describe preliminary applications of network analysis techniques to eye-tracking data collected during a collaborative learning activity. This paper makes three contributions: first, we visualize collaborative eye-tracking data as networks, where the nodes of the graph represent fixations and edges represent saccades. We found that those represe...

Educators aspire to transfer of learning as a goal of their teaching. Expansive Framing and Preparation for Future Learning (PFL) are new perspectives on how to foster and assess transfer. As computing education makes its way into K-12 schools, efforts are underway to introduce children to programming in block-based environments like Scratch and Al...

Educators aspire to transfer of learning as a goal of their teaching. Expansive Framing and Preparation for Future Learning (PFL) are new perspectives on how to foster and assess transfer. As computing education makes its way into K-12 schools, efforts are underway to introduce children to programming in block-based environments like Scratch and Al...

As computing curricula continue to make their way into K-12 schools, the issue of assessing student learning of computational concepts remains a thorny one. This paper describes the multiple forms of assessments used in a 6-week middle school curriculum with the goal of capturing a holistic view of student learning. A key aspect of this research is...

Past research extensively points to gross misperceptions of the discipline of Computer Science among students in middle and high school. As efforts to introduce computing education in K-12 gains traction in tandem with initiatives that address issues of interest and attitudes towards CS, misperceptions of computing as a discipline must also be addr...

Lack of teachers to teach computer science (CS) and pedagogically sound introductory CS curricula remain a significant challenge facing secondary schools attempting to teach CS. This paper describes our efforts to design and pilot an online 6-week middle/high school course using Stanford's OpenEdX platform. The pedagogy, curriculum and assessment a...

The present invention provides electronic methods and apparatus for interactively authoring, sharing and analyzing digital video content. Methods for authoring include displaying visual data, defining each traversal as a time-based sequence of frames and annotating and storing a record of the traversal and its associated audio records. Defining the...

Since the dawn of humanity, people have learned outdoors while on the move. Now, mobile phones and tablet computers are enhancing this personal form of learning by connecting across time and space. In many developing countries, including most of sub-Saharan Africa, there is no fixed line communication infrastructure, so a wireless mobile device pro...

In this paper we present the results of an eye-tracking study on collaborative problem-solving dyads. Dyads remotely collaborated to learn from contrasting cases involving basic concepts about how the human brain processes visual information. In one condition, dyads saw the eye gazes of their partner on the screen; in a control group, they did not...

How Humans Learn to Think Mathematically describes the development of mathematical thinking from the young child to the sophisticated adult. Professor David Tall reveals the reasons why mathematical concepts that make sense in one context may become problematic in another. For example, a child's experience of whole number arithmetic successively af...

Recently, due to the technological limitation of artificial intelligence of social robots, robot-assisted learning research and marketing have been formed around the language education of school children rather than adults. When making initial acceptance decisions, such as for adopting robots as teaching assistants, as a factor of the technology ac...

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been at the center of media attention and hyperbole since 2012. As MOOCs proliferate and continue to influence higher education, it is increasingly pressing to define frameworks for their design and evaluation. This paper proposes such a framework, grounded in CSCL and learning sciences research along with...

In this paper we describe preliminary applications of network analysis techniques to eye-tracking data. In a previous study, the first author conducted a collaborative learning experiment in which subjects had access (or not) to a gaze-awareness tool: their task was to learn from neuroscience diagrams in a remote collaboration. In the treatment gro...

The Educational Data Scientist is currently a poorly understood, rarely sighted breed. Reports vary: some are known to be largely nocturnal, solitary creatures, while others have been reported to display highly social behaviour in broad daylight. What are their primary habits? How do they see the world? What ecological niches do they occupy now, an...

In this paper, we describe the development and evaluation of a microworld-based learning environment for neuroscience. Our system, BrainExplorer, allows students to discover the way neural pathways work by interacting with a tangible user interface. By severing and reconfiguring connections, users can observe how the visual field is impaired and, t...

Past research on children and programming from the 1980s called for deepening the study of the pedagogy of programming in order to help children build better cognitive models of foundational concepts of CS. More recently, computing education researchers are beginning to recognize the need to apply the learning sciences to develop age- and grade-app...

Jeannette Wing’s influential article on computational thinking 6 years ago argued for adding this new competency to every child’s analytical ability as a vital ingredient of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. What is computational thinking? Why did this article resonate with so many and serve as a rallying cry for ed...

What is mathematics? And what counts as mathematics in people’s activities at home, work, and school in daily life? One might try to answer this question by consulting expert mathematicians and philosophers, or by examining the historical role that mathematics has played in shaping major scientific and technical advances. We take a far less lofty a...

In this paper we present the results of an eye-tracking study on collaborative problem-solving dyads. Dyads remotely worked on contrasting cases to study how the human brain processes visual information. In one condition, dyads saw the gaze of their partner on the screen; in a control group, they did not have access to this information. Results ind...

LET'S GO aims to develop, implement, research, and scale a new paradigm to foster collaborative student learning in ecological sciences. We integrate geo-positional data sensing, participation frameworks for learner collaboration, mobile inquiry, reflection and information visualization tools to create science learning collaboratories. We describe...

In order for families to engage in math play, we created several mobile applications that were designed to maintain fidelity with family practices while simultaneously providing opportunities for mathematical learning. We explain our reasons for developing apps that rely on social models of play, outline design principles that emerged from research...

Neuroscience has recently brought many insights into the inner workings of the human brain. The way neuroscience is taught, however, has lagged behind and still relies on direct instruction or textbooks. We argue that the spatial nature of the brain makes it an ideal candidate for hands-on activities coupled with a tangible interface. In this paper...

This series for Cambridge University Press is widely known as an international forum for studies of situated learning and cognition. Innovative contributions are being made by anthropology; by cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology; by computer science; by education; and by social theory. These contributions are providing the basis for n...

Digital video technologies offer a variety of functions for supporting collaborative learning in classrooms. Yet, for novice learners, such as school students, positive learning outcomes also depend centrally on effective social interactions. We present empirical evidence for the positive effects of instructive guidance on performance and on learni...

An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use--including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on...

Despite the exponential growth of the research on Learning Analytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) over the last few years, the work has been still distant from the core Learning Sciences methods, theoretical constructs, and literature. At the same time, over the last 15 years, Learning Sciences as a field has been quite innovative, eclect...

We present the design and evaluation of a technique for influencing user respiration by integrating respiration-pacing methods into the desktop operating system in a peripheral manner. Peripheral paced respiration differs from prior techniques in that it does not require the user's full attention. We conducted a within-subjects study to evaluate th...

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