The PTSOT instrument measures the spatial perspective-taking (SPT) ability by recording the angular errors as one calculates the distance between an object’s actual and expected spatial position. We use an Augmented Reality Enhanced Learning Environment (ARELE), GeoSolvAR, which has been shown to improve middle grader’s SPT ability. Here, we report the problem-solving process of students who had worked with both the inquiry and AR components of GeoSolvAR (experimental group, n=25) and showed significant improvement in their SPT, and students who worked only with the AR component of the ARELE (control group) and did not show improvement in their SPT (n=22). We conduct an item-wise analysis of students’ performance with the PTSOT instrument in both these groups. We find a slight negative, insignificant correlation between the reduction in average angular errors and the angular distance of target objects for the control group r (10) = -.36, p =.254, but a significant positive correlation between the reduction of angular errors and the angular distance for the experimental group, r (10) =.67, p =.017, suggesting that GeoSolvAR is effective for complex SPT questions based on larger angular-distances.

Computational Thinking (CT) is a critical thinking ability we want children to develop for efficient and effective problem-solving. Aligned with the recent unplugged, non-digital approach to developing CT, we show, through this ongoing study, in a low- resource, no-computer context, how behavioral dispositions of children map onto the established facets of being a 'good' computational thinker. Twenty middle-school children (Mean age 14.6 years, 12) volunteered to participate in an experimental study, where they were randomly grouped into one control (n-9) and two experimental groups (n=5, 6). The experimental groups were administered a 'sorting' task and a 'sorting + simulation' task, respectively, and all the groups were administered a standardized CT test (CTt) as the pre and post-test. We use a mixed-method research design to analyze our data. Our quantitative methods revealed no significant difference between the pre and post-CTt scores but better performance on 'arrow' questions than on 'visual-block' questions. Our qualitative methods provide insights into students' problem-solving and learning processes. They reveal their ability to 'persist', 'abstract', 'verify', and render a 'generic' solution mapped onto the established CT skills of iteration, abstraction, debugging, and algorithm generating.

Habits are formed when people perform repeated actions in a certain context while pursuing a goal. In the context of a semester-long Instructional System Design course, we show how the goal of designing a real-life website for the sensitization of teachers and peers toward disabled students led to the construction of certain desirable learning habits. The participants in the course were the default IS designers and the Persons with Disability (PwD) cell of the institute was the client. Anchored in the Interest-driven creator (IDC) theory, this study provides evidence for the three conceptual components of the habit loop- cuing environment, routine, and harmony. We argue that the real-life goal provided a fertile ground for routinizing the behavioral and conceptual activities of the participants. We use a combination of deductive and inductive coding to analyze the data sources of interviews, class interaction observations, shared documents for class reflection, and class interaction records in a virtual space. Our findings suggest that the physical and virtual spaces for regular class interaction, learners' routine interaction with the group members, and the constant sharing-cum-discussion of ideas scaffolded desirable learning habits as they pursued the common goal of website design. This study has implications for fostering desirable learning habits in regular classroom interactions.

Feedback is known to play a powerful role in the process of learning and problem-solving. In a problem-solving context where feedback is expected to positively influence the process of achieving the target goal, feedback information can be elicited through feedback-seeking questions. In this study, we analyze different purposes for which feedback is both sought and given by chemistry undergraduate students (n=3) as they solved representational problems concerning a medicinal drug. The students were left unsupervised and, with their consent, were video-recorded to capture their problem-solving process. We used the transcript of the video data and coded students’ interactions to identify feedback events concerning ‘the task’, ‘process’, and ‘regulation’ of the problem-solving activity. These events were then used to generate process models of feedback behavior of students, individually and collaboratively, through ProM- a process mining tool. Our models suggest that feedback questions on tasks and processes dominate the beginning of the problem-solving activity, while feedback responses on processes and regulation dominate the end phase. Our work has implications for designing activity problems. We suggest designing well-thought-out focus questions at the beginning of problem-solving exercises to both scaffold and facilitate students’ learning because it aligns with the natural unsupervised flow of problem-solving, as is observed in this study.

Critical-thinking (CT) is a higher order cognitive activity which is consequential for human decision-making. We propose a ‘solenoid’ model that demonstrates how technological tools can be used as scaffolds to advance the development of CT dispositions and abilities of learners in an online-classroom. 15 graduate students enrolled in a course on Human-Computer Interaction, were systematically engaged in an alternating series of individual and collaborative tasks, employing tools that enabled elicitation of learners’ ability to analyze, evaluate and reason, and, further, to enable synchronous collaboration. The collaborative tasks involved ‘interactive’ and ‘constructive’ engagement by letting learners build and reline concept-maps respectively. The individual tasks involved ‘critical’ and ‘reflective’ engagement by letting learners evaluate and reflect on the mapping task respectively. For the latter task, online semi-structured clinical interviews were conducted with all the students. Here, we present a detailed case-study to demonstrate how the solenoid model can be used to elicit CT skills in a completely online class and how it can be mapped on to learners’ reasoning process.