Teaching is one of many professions for which personalized feedback and reflection can help improve dialogue and discussion between the professional and those they serve. However, professional development (PD) is often impersonal as human observation is labor-intensive. Data-driven PD tools in teaching are of growing interest, but open questions about how professionals engage with their data in practice remain. In this paper, we present ClassInSight, a tool that visualizes three levels of teachers’ discussion data and structures reflection. Through 22 reflection sessions and interviews with 5 high school science teachers, we found themes related to dissonance, contextualization, and sustainability in how teachers engaged with their data in the tool and in how their professional vision, the use of professional expertise to interpret events, shifted over time. We discuss guidelines for these conversational support tools to support personalized PD in professions beyond teaching where conversation and interaction are important.

Mentoring is crucial for teachers' professional development but challenges of access, resources and capacity make it difficult for regular in-person mentorship in low-infrastructure contexts. Mobile technologies such as social media have the potential to scale teacher professional development and communities. This paper explores the culture of teacher mentorship in rural Cote d'Ivoire and the motivations and challenges mentors face in using mobile technology in their work through semi-structured interviews with 33 teacher mentors. We found that mentors valued social connections and knowledge sharing in using mobile technology. However, power dynamics between teachers and mentors affected how they could collaborate. Mentors also expressed frustrations with the lack of moderation within social media groups. Lack of infrastructure and connectivity also raise potential issues of inclusion and access to rural areas and schools. We conclude with design recommendations for technologies that scale culturally-relevant teaching mentorship in low-infrastructure contexts.

Multi-modal classroom sensing systems can collect complex behaviors in the classroom at a scale and precision far greater than human observers to capture learning insights and provide personalized teaching feedback. As students are critical stakeholders in the adoption of smart classrooms for the improvement of teaching, open questions remain in understanding student perspectives on the use of their data to provide insights to instructors. We conducted a Speed Dating with storyboards study to explore student values and boundaries regarding the acceptance of classroom sensing systems in STEM college courses. We found that students have several emergent beliefs about teaching and learning that influence their views towards smart classroom technologies. Students also held contextual views on the boundaries of data use depending on the outcome. Our findings have implications for the design and communication of classroom sensing systems that reconcile student and instructor beliefs around teaching and learning.

As governments in developing countries race to solve the global learning crisis, a key focus is on novel teaching approaches as taught in pedagogical programs. To scale, these pedagogical programs rely on government teacher training infrastructure. However, these programs face challenges in rural parts of Africa where there is a lack of advisor support, teachers are isolated and technology infrastructure is still emerging. Conversational agents have addressed some of these challenges by scaling expert knowledge and providing personalized interactions, but it is unclear how this work can translate to rural African contexts. To explore the use of such technology in this design space, we conducted two related studies. The first was a qualitative study with 20 teachers and ministry officials in rural Côte d’Ivoire to understand opportunities and challenges in technology use for these stakeholders. Second, we shared a conversational agent probe over WhatsApp to 38 teachers for 14-weeks to better understand what we learned in the survey and to uncover realistic use cases from these stakeholders. Our findings were examined through a theoretical lens of aspirations to discover sustainable design directions for conversational agents to support teachers in low infrastructure settings.

Examples are powerful tools for creativity and can provide inspiration and structure. However, novices often don’t know when to seek examples or how to apply them. Showing real-time examples targeted to the current task (adaptive conceptual guidance) may help novices consider inspiration more often and better implement the ideas that examples illustrate. We explore this in a Wizard-of-Oz system, Shöwn, that presents examples based on the user’s current activity while drawing a comic strip. Shöwn’s design is informed by interviews with novice and expert comic artists (n=18). A between-subjects experiment (n=24) found that adaptive conceptual guidance improved the clarity and uniqueness of drawings and stories compared to non-adaptive examples. Users also found the examples more useful and inspirational than those without adaptive guidance. Our results present an initial exploration of the challenges and benefits of contextually showing examples in interactive creativity tools.

Misunderstandings of science affect many lives. Novices commonly misunderstand explanations by overly relying on surface details instead of evaluating underlying logic. Prior work has found adding a patina of neuroscience leads readers towards positively assessing explanations. How might we help people better understand science explanations? A between-subjects experiment tested whether asking readers to reconstruct experiments leads them to focus more on underlying logic. Participants relied less on irrelevant surface details when reconstructing experiments. However, this did not impact their subsequent assessment of explanations. Our results suggest that reconstruction is a useful strategy for understanding explanations but is not readily transferred towards evaluating explanations.

Creative work combines exploratory thinking to find novel solutions and exploitative thinking to refine those solutions. People often assume that the idea they come up with has to be the "correct solution," leading to under-exploration and preemptive exploitation. Despite advances in the practitioner literature, a cognitive and empirical basis of exploration strategies remains sparse. My dissertation examines scaffolding methods to enhance exploration in creative tasks. I investigate this through two interventions at different stages of the creative process. First, interactive guidance and adaptive suggestions embodied in the CritiqueKit system to improve evaluation of creative work. Second, problem-framing scaffolds that attune people towards the phases of exploration and exploitation during ideation. My research demonstrates content and process scaffolds with applications in the design of creativity support tools and creative education pedagogy.

Effective creative work requires both "hot" (exploratory) and "cool" (exploitative) thinking. Unfortunately, many people (especially novices) under-explore, jumping to the "cool'' part too quickly, because they assume their current thinking "has to be" the path. This paper presents empirical results of how metaphorical problem framing scaffolds can influence creative performance. The task used De Bono's "Thinking Hats." In a between-subjects experiment comparing exploratory to exploitative problem frames, the exploratory problem frame led to more original designs and more diverse ideas during brainstorming. This work provides an empirical baseline of how -- even for short tasks -- assigning people responsibility for broad thinking leads to better creative work.

Complex activities often require people to work across multiple software applications. However, people frequently lack valuable knowledge about at least one application, especially as software changes and new software emerges. Existing help systems either lack contextual knowledge or are tightly-knit into a single application. We introduce an application-independent approach for contextually presenting video learning resources and demonstrate it through the RePlay system. RePlay uses accessibility APIs to gather context about the user's activity. It leverages an existing search engine to present relevant videos and highlights key segments within them using video captions. We report on a week-long field study (n=7) and a lab study (n=24) showing that contextual assistance helps people spend less time away from their task than web video search and replaces current video navigation strategies. Our findings highlight challenges with representing and using context across applications.

Good feedback is critical to creativity and learning, yet rare. Many people do not know how to actually provide effective feedback. There is increasing demand for quality feedback -- and thus feedback givers -- in learning and professional settings. This paper contributes empirical evidence that two interactive techniques -- reusable suggestions and adaptive guidance -- can improve feedback on creative work. We present these techniques embodied in the CritiqueKit system to help reviewers give specific, actionable, and justified feedback. Two real-world deployment studies and two controlled experiments with CritiqueKit found that adaptively-presented suggestions improve the quality of feedback from novice reviewers. Reviewers also reported that suggestions and guidance helped them describe their thoughts and reminded them to provide effective feedback.

This work examines whether templates designed from principles of multimedia learning design, and learning sciences research, can support peer instruction in creating more effective educational content on the web. Initial results show that the structure and guidelines within these templates can help novices produce meaningful learning content while improving the overall learning experience. This experiment provides insights into how to design and implement structured outlines online for web users to share learning content, and potentially shift researchers' focus to more learner-centered online education.