The interrelationship between concepts about agency and students' use of teachable-agent learning technology.

To successfully interact with software agents, people must call upon basic concepts about goals and intentionality and strategically deploy these concepts in a range of circumstances where specific entailments may or may not apply. We hypothesize that people who can effectively deploy agency concepts in new situations will be more effective in interactions with software agents. Further, we posit that interacting with a software agent can itself refine a person's deployment of agency concepts.

Identifying middle school students' challenges in computational thinking-based science learning.

Computational thinking (CT) parallels the core practices of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and is believed to effectively support students' learning of science and math concepts. However, despite the synergies between CT and STEM education, integrating the two to support synergistic learning remains an important challenge. Relatively, little is known about how a student's conceptual understanding develops in such learning environments and the difficulties they face when learning with such integrated curricula.