ABSTRACT Background An apprenticeship model is proposed as a mechanism for the development of skill inargumentation, with gains serving as a bridge to individual-written arguments, a skill known to be weak at all ages. Method In a multi-week intervention, young adolescents assigned to an experimental group (n = 32) was paired with a series of both more skilled and similarly skilled partners in conducting electronic dialogs on controversial issues. In a comparison condition (n = 42), participants engaged in dialogs with only similarly skilled peers. Findings In a later assessment of individual argument skills on a new topic, the experimental group showed more skilled argument moves they had encountered in their dialogs, relative to the group who had engaged only with peers – a result thereby demonstrating the passage of higher-order intellectual skills from one individual to another and, within the individual, from a social to individual level. Contribution In addition to their educational implications, these results lend support to both an apprenticeship model and a dialogical model of argument skill development.

ABSTRACT Background The value of causal reasoning is widely appreciated by educators, yet little research has been dedicated to determining how it develops in social contexts. This study examined children’s construction of causal reasoning during collaborative discussions in elementary school classrooms and investigated whether they were able to transfer causal reasoning displayed during the discussions to individual tasks. Methods Multilink causal chain models were tracked in 24 collaborative discussions involving 160 underserved fifth-graders, 154 individually written essays about the question addressed in the discussion, and 95 individual oral interviews about an analogous question. Path analyses were conducted to document connections between learning processes and products. Findings Recurrent patterns of multilink causal reasoning were identified in 92% of the collaborative discussions. Students were found to use what they had learned about the construction of multilink causal chains in collaborative groups in an independently written essay and a knowledge transfer interview. Peer modeling played a key role in fostering the transfer of multilink causal reasoning for children who could not produce causal chains themselves. Contribution Overall, this analysis of the social construction of multilink causal chains provides distinctive new evidence that enabling meaningful interaction among children promotes higher-level cognitive development.

ABSTRACT Background Increasingly, the co-design of AI tools has attended to relationality and ethics. Building on scholarship on speculative dreaming and the interactional construction of ideological stances, this article examines the possibilities and challenges of how new, expansive, AI-supported worlds are constructed within co-design spaces. Methodology Using the framework of figured worlds, we analyze two social design-based workshops with high-school aged youth participants. The workshops sought to surface participants’ expansive visions for ideal collaboration in schools and to understand the affordances and constraints of AI in making those visions a reality. Findings The pedagogical structures of a co-design activity made salient key relationships in youth participant’s lives, which they then sought to re-envision. While assembling these speculative worlds, participants appropriated existing relationships from well-established worlds, which most commonly pulled them toward reproducing the status quo. Co-design activities that made salient familiar but alternative worlds helped to resist that pull. Contributions In the process of constructing expansive worlds, lived relationships from existing social worlds—both dominant and expansive—are pulled in. We introduce a world-building framework that highlights key mechanisms in this process and connects them to pedagogical structures that may support co-design participants in envisioning AI possibilities beyond the status quo.

ABSTRACT Background STEM participation is often associated with the disenfranchisement of historically marginalized individuals. Disrupting these standing injustices to establish rightful presence with equitable opportunity, access, and cultural standing to shape and pursue STEM endeavors in ways that are inclusive of individuals’ identities is a critical objective. However, research to understand and facilitate STEM experiences of queer youth what are also navigating their own relationships with gender- and heteronormativity is limited. Making—employing STEM to design artifacts in an informal learning environment—can disrupt conventional approaches to STEM activity in ways that support inclusive STEM engagement through crafting and personalized design. Method This social design experiment examines the ways in which the design of maker activities and spaces can support queer rightful presence within STEM spaces. Findings We found that maker communities can frame and collectively engage issues of identity formulation that are both dynamic and fluid in nature as part of bolstering STEM affinity. As participants’ multifaceted identities unfolded through making projects that deliberately invited identity into design, they established rightful presence for intertwined queer and STEM identities. Contribution This study extends the rightful presence framework to engage fluid, queer identities and illustrates making rightful presence practices that deliberately engage multifaceted identities.

ABSTRACT Background 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. Methods Over 200 youth, ages 5–15, were randomly assigned to 90-minute introductions to one of five commercial circuitry toolkits. Youth took a pre- and post-assessment; we analyzed results using quantitative tests of significance. We used an established sorting task to gather youth perspectives of the tools as identity texts through design markers of gendered identities within the toolkits. We examined the relationship between learning outcomes and the gendered design components of the toolkits. Findings Toolkits that privilege feminine or artistic elements significantly impacted learning more than traditional toolkits used in schools, which showed little to no significant learning gains. We relate this to the inextricability of materiality and the gendered identities of these tools and materials. Contribution This study shows how arts-based or feminine-coded tools can be more effective for teaching and learning, serving as a counter to common resistance to adopting such tools and materials for STEM learning. We outline design implications for toolkits and educational experiences to disrupt stagnant social, cultural, and historical norms in STEM education.

ABSTRACT Background 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 are the outcomes of IL-Humanities in terms of interdisciplinary competences? (2) How do learners in these environments engage in cross-disciplinary knowledge building and transdisciplinary identity work? Methods We assessed the efficacy of IL-Humanities across ten Israeli middle schools through a pre-post intervention/comparison design, utilizing the novel Interdisciplinary Competences Assessment (ICA). Qualitative insights into the learning processes within classrooms were derived using discourse analysis methods. Findings Students’ interdisciplinary competences were found to increase following the IL-Humanities interventions. Qualitative analyses offered “thick descriptions” of the process: Students leveraged cross-disciplinary transfer of knowledge to deepen their understanding of complex phenomena and used personal narratives to engage in identity work. Contribution This study enhances interdisciplinary education research by: (1) providing and operationalizing a model of interdisciplinary competences as an assessment tool; (2) demonstrating the effectiveness of IL-Humanities environments in developing these competences; and (3) advancing our understanding of learners’ engagement with cross-disciplinary knowledge building and transdisciplinary identity work.

ABSTRACT Background 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 interdisciplinarity. Yet, we have much to learn about how CBREs work, and even more to learn about how disciplinary diversity operates as an element of design to promote learning and research. Method This mixed methods case study triangulates data on student experience, research networks, research artifacts and fieldnotes from participant observation to understand how disciplinary diversity factors into productive engagement for learning and research in an interdisciplinary course-based research experience (I-CBRE). Findings A common boundary object (scientific paper) mediated developmental interactions among individuals both within and beyond the course. The boundary object also facilitated the productive engagement of students as instrumental actors in broader interdisciplinary research networks. Contribution This study shows how an “object tracing” approach can be used to examine productivity in disciplinarily diverse scientific contexts, and reveals some of the distinctly syncretic moves that participants deploy to make progress as learners and researchers. Extending work by Engel and Conant, the study emphasizes the importance of designing for “productive syncretic engagement” in research experiences characterized disciplinary diversity.

ABSTRACT Background 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 professional development (PD) community used substrate (shared interactional resources) in sensemaking interactions to reify or rearticulate dominant ideologies. Method We analyzed PD interactions to understand how PD community members used substrate across multiple timescales as part of ideological sensemaking. Findings We first show how participants drew on substrate to rearticulate ideologies about young learners’ capabilities in science. We then show how limited resources available in substrate impeded interactional engagement with deficit narratives of multilingual learners. Contribution Practically, we demonstrate how ideological rearticulation requires establishing intentionally designed substrate as a resource for later PD and facilitation that surfaces and challenges dominant ideologies. Methodologically, we show how substrate—often analyzed at microgenetic scales—can be traced back over longer timescales to understand longitudinal learning.

ABSTRACT Background The sociocultural turn redefined learning in terms of shifting identities. In recent years, learning scientists have explored the connections between learning and various types of identities, including disciplinary identity, gender, race, and more. In this article we focus on national identity, to understand how it is constructed and how it might be made more inclusive through learning. Methods Drawing on sociolinguistics and discourse analysis methods, we present a telling case study aimed at elucidating previously obscure theoretical relations by providing a rich and detailed account of a single student whose national identity shifted over the course of a school year. Findings Our analysis shows how Joshua, a 9th grade secular Jewish-Israeli student, constructed his national identity. Joshua’s identity developed across three stages, which were marked by a shift from an essentialist disposition to a constructionist one and by an increasing sense of belonging. Contribution We highlight a connection between learners’ views on the continuum between essentialism and constructionism and their degree of belongingness. Our findings suggest that a constructionist approach to identity can translate into a greater sense of belonging and help ameliorate some cases of social marginalization.

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 research questions centered on identifying (RQ1) the types of problems that require students’ collective regulation, . Our population included learners aged 8-12 enrolled in a play-based after school HCI design club. Using micro-analytic techniques, we examined the HCI design processes of four teams over nine sessions and four learners over two years. Findings We identified the most common problems students encountered, how regulation and negotiation played out across different levels of analysis, what types of learning occurred as participants worked to improve collaborative processes over time, and the role that technology played in the process. Contribution We end the paper by proposing a model of how nested collective knowledge building processes evolve over time and discuss the implications of our findings for K-12 HCI education.