ISLS 2026 Agenda

Thursday, June 18 · 36 sessions

8:00 AM

12 options scroll

Practice Paper · ALP 1100

Co-designing Teaching and Learning Experiences

Practice-oriented papers share co-designed teaching experiences across varied contexts, including wordless books for dual-language kindergarteners, community-building in online undergraduate courses, and board game design with Brownie Scouts. Other talks address climate justice instruction, metacognitive learning strategies, and research-practice partnerships in teacher education.

Equity, Justice & Inclusion 6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1110

Co-design, creative methods art-based approaches

Six papers explore co-design and creative methods, from tangible classroom models and arts-based climate storytelling to liberatory computational making with Black boys and trust-building in design-based research teams. Threads include reconceptualizing imagination as social practice and using network analysis to improve co-designed online graduate courses.

Co-Design & Participatory Design 6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Teacher professional development in practice

Papers report on teacher professional development in practice, examining tolerance for ambiguity in model-based science, dialogic teaching change through video-based PD, and teachers' evolving views of scientific uncertainty as a resource. Other talks cover computational thinking PD, video-based math identity research, and pre-service teachers' TPACK trajectories.

Teacher Learning & Professional Development 6 talks

Symposium · ALP 1300

Renewing Socio-cultural theory in a Networked, Decentralized Supercapitalist Society

Three papers and discussion ask what socio-cultural theory offers for understanding learning amid extremism, online fragmentation, and supercapitalist cultural structures. Cases draw on community partners including Homeboy Industries, academic esports federations, and Indigenous education partners to examine how macro cultural trends shape learning today.

Sociocultural & Activity-Theory Frameworks

Hybrid Symposium · ALP 1600

Evaluating and assessing learning in AI-embedded environments: perspectives across learning scientists

A hybrid poster symposium of eight studies framing evaluation of AI-supported learning as a relational, ethical practice rather than a matter of technical accuracy. Across classrooms, tutoring, and teacher coaching, researchers use discourse analytics, video analysis, and practical measures to examine AI's effects on collaboration, belonging, and cognition through human-centered, equity-oriented design.

AI in Education

Long Paper · ALP 1700

Argumentation, Discourse, and Agency

Papers examine argumentation, discourse, and agency across settings, from learner feedback agency and laypeople's evaluation of online health information to thinking routines in EFL film discussions. Additional talks address facilitation dilemmas in teacher video clubs and learner engagement in LLM-supported complex-systems simulations.

Higher Education & Undergraduate Learning 5 talks

Symposium · ALP 2300

Investigating, Understanding, and Generating Concreteness in STEM Education

A symposium examining the role of concreteness and abstraction in STEM learning, offering a critical perspective on concrete representations and a data-driven taxonomy for describing them. Contributions also present automatic generation of concrete representations and connect mathematics-education discourse to other STEM disciplines.

STEM Education

Long Paper · ALP 2600

Ideology, Culture, and Race in Learning

A long-paper session on how ideology, culture, and race shape learning and teaching, with studies on facilitator sensemaking about social-emotional learning in a refugee program and a justice-centered genetics unit on racial health disparities. Other papers analyze whiteness in science professional development and the epistemic work of a right-wing education podcast.

Equity, Justice & Inclusion 4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2700

VR/AR/MR/XR and immersive learning

A short-paper session on immersive learning across VR, AR, and mixed reality, addressing how to assess learning processes with multimodal and log data rather than pre-post tests alone. Studies span AR multispecies inquiry with bees, instructional sequencing in VR, career exploration, and mobile AR for adult language learning.

Immersive & Extended Reality (VR/AR/XR) 5 talks

Symposium · ALP 2nd Floor Rear

Broadening the Boundaries of the Learning Sciences: Reclaiming the Territory of Latin American Contributions to Educational Research

This symposium reimagines the Learning Sciences through Latin American epistemologies, weaving studies of Mapuche weaving mathematics, Uruguayan rural futures, and WhatsApp organizing at the Mexico-US border. Empirical work across Colombia, Ecuador, and beyond puts constructionism, ethnomathematics, and decolonial speculation in dialogue with field theories.

Indigenous, Decolonial & Global South Perspectives

Short Paper · ALP 3600

Humanities, Civics, and Learning

A short-paper session on humanities, civics, and learning, examining ethical sensemaking, informal learning, and political contestation across global contexts. Topics include mobile-phone learning among Jamaican farmers, children's more-than-human ethical reasoning, young activists comparing the Holocaust to current wars, and school change in India.

Sociocultural & Activity-Theory Frameworks 4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 3610

Environmental Learning and Sustainability

Four papers address environmental learning and sustainability, including relational trust in community-engaged environmental justice partnerships and a comparative case of youth reducing food waste in schools. Threads also cover a transition-design workshop on sustainable futures and co-design routines centering community knowledge in the Indian Himalayas.

Climate & Environmental Education 4 talks

10:00 AM

11 options scroll

Short Paper · ALP 1100

Scaffolding and design of scaffolds

Papers examine scaffolding and scaffold design, from teachers co-navigating student uncertainty in science to instructional scaffolding of interlocking models in phenomenon-driven units. Other talks cover curriculum-mediated teacher noticing in geometry simulations, personalized Parsons code puzzles, and AI designed to scaffold generative cognitive engagement.

Self-Regulated & Socially Shared Regulation 5 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1110

Data Literacy and Data Science Education

Papers on data literacy and data science education range from students creating biometric data visualizations to confronting coloniality and Indigenous food sovereignty in data science. Threads include youth conceptions of data, a roleplay-based curriculum embedding epistemological pluralism, and epistemic practices in an online fitness community.

Data Science & Data Literacy Education 6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Argumentation, dialogue, and dialogic engagement

Papers examine argumentation and dialogic engagement, from supporting competent outsiders' source evaluation with the AIR framework to a dual preparation model for dialogic teaching in East Asian classrooms. Other talks offer a typology of social bids in math groupwork and interaction analysis of knowledge construction in multilingual Indian science classrooms.

STEM Education 4 talks

Hybrid Symposium · ALP 1600

Learning Sciences in the Global South: Dialogue for multiple ways of knowing and doing

This hybrid symposium argues for multiplicity in ways of knowing and doing, drawing on cases from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia where scholars adapt and expand conventional research. The stories foreground tensions and (in)visible privileges in Global South scholarship, with dialogue continuing during and after the conference.

Indigenous, Decolonial & Global South Perspectives

Long Paper · ALP 1700

Epistemic Cognition

Long papers on epistemic cognition examine how learners coordinate knowledge and evaluate sources, including physics students' math-concept integration and high schoolers' epistemic vigilance toward everyday science. Additional talks cover epistemic navigation in a unit on Traditional Chinese Medicine and how laypeople resolve expert disagreement.

Epistemic Cognition & Argumentation 4 talks

Symposium · ALP 2300

Co-design as Transformative Pedagogical Spaces: what zooming out teaches us about learning to co-design together

This symposium gathers researchers and practitioners across participatory design, youth participatory action research, and research-practice partnerships to challenge how co-design is treated as brief, isolated activity. By zooming out temporally and analytically, the papers reveal co-design as relational, political, and ethical practice honed over longer timescales.

Co-Design & Participatory Design

Long Paper · ALP 2600

Dialogic Conversation and Pre-Service Teachers

Long papers focus on pre-service teachers and dialogic conversation, including science teachers rehearsing questioning with AI-based and VR classroom simulators. Other talks examine an AI-feedback co-design intervention for math tutors' productive talk and learning-analytics-supported reflective assessment for knowledge building.

Teacher Learning & Professional Development 4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2700

AI Literacy, AI Tools, Teacher learning

Short papers address AI literacy, AI tools, and teacher learning, tracing teachers' evolving participation in AI education and critical AI literacy developed through design problem solving. Threads include posthuman creativity with GenAI in an Indian design workshop, redistributing cognition in AI-supported writing, and instructor scaffolding of student GenAI use.

Generative AI & Large Language Models 6 talks

Symposium · ALP 2nd Floor Rear

Insights from International Partnerships on Infrastructuring for Maker Education

This structured poster symposium uses infrastructuring as a lens to examine the supports needed to integrate maker education into formal schooling. International research groups collaborating with local stakeholders share insights on the tensions between grassroots maker movements and established school systems.

Maker Education & Constructionism

Short Paper · ALP 3600

Strategies and frameworks for learning analytics at multiple scales

Short papers present strategies and frameworks for learning analytics at multiple scales, including latent profile analysis of math anxiety in game-based learning and teacher engagement in micro-credential PD. Other talks compare small versus large language models for generating math problems and examine self-regulated learning with GenAI.

Mathematics Education 6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 3610

Critical Perspectives in Learning Environments

Short papers bring critical perspectives to learning environments, covering AI-supported personality alignment among pre-service teachers, teachers designing AI-ethics scenarios with LLM tools, and whether critical pedagogy survives algorithmic social-media constraints. Other talks explore service-learning tutoring and equity, and game-based learning in literature classrooms.

Design-Based Research 5 talks

2:30 PM

12 options scroll

Short Paper · ALP 1110

AI tools, interactions, and design

Six short papers on designing AI tools and understanding human-AI interaction in learning. Topics include AI's effect on the writing process, hybrid-intelligence and human-in-the-loop systems, four years of AI formative assessment and fairness, conversation-based assessment with AI agents, and new interfaces for AI-supported writing.

AI in Education 6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Embodied Learning

Five short papers on how bodies, movement, and representations mediate learning across science and mathematics. Topics include walking curricula reconnecting students with nature, transnational youth and climate justice, multimodal methods for analyzing embodied geometry, domain-inherent metaphors, and diagrams that bridge real and mathematical worlds.

Embodied & Multimodal Learning 5 talks

Symposium · ALP 1300

Scaling Communities of Learners: How Size, Power, and Partnerships Shape Political Learning

A symposium using sociocultural and critical theories of power to examine how community scale shapes political learning for equity and justice. Across four cases ranging from organizational change in graduate education to a youth design-build group, teacher-leaders organizing for integration, and a single teacher-mentor dyad, it traces how transformation is mediated across community sizes.

Equity, Justice & Inclusion

Hybrid Symposium · ALP 1600

Fostering Educational Intimacy: ILSSA Intergenerational Partnerships for Purposeful Community Building

A reflective session from the ILSSA student association exploring what community means and how to support it equitably, using duoethnography and Uttamchandani's concept of educational intimacy. The discussion considers intergenerational partnerships, embracing the political in learning, and building relational continuity across ILSSA's leadership and the communities it represents.

Equity, Justice & Inclusion

Long Paper · ALP 1700

Teacher Transformation

Four papers on how teachers become agents of transformation through partnerships, mentoring, and boundary crossing. Cases include a composite counterstory of teacher change, science educators reconciling personal beliefs with official scripts, cohort-based research-practice partnerships, and high-coupling encounters bridging maritime and education communities.

Teacher Learning & Professional Development 4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2100

Art and Politics

Four papers exploring how the arts mediate identity, perspective, and political visibility for youth and learners. Threads include perspective-shifting through filmmaking, manga as counterspaces for queer youth, the director's role in ensemble learning, and how video analysis can racialize the visibility of Black learners.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency 4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2300

AI and Ethics

Four papers on teaching and studying AI ethics across age groups and methods. Approaches include a literature review of AI ethics in ISLS proceedings, tabletop and scenario-based games for fostering multidimensional and ethical thinking, and laddering methodology for surfacing young children's values in design.

AI & Data Literacy 4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2500

Motivation, Interest, Identity, and Achievement

Four quantitative papers linking motivation, identity, belonging, and achievement, several at large scale. Topics span equity-oriented pedagogy predicting college success, the attenuation of math identity across the high-school-to-STEM transition, motivation mediating belonging and STEM persistence, and affective-cognitive links in primary students' scientific literacy.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency 4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2600

Epistemic Authority and Agency

Four papers examining how authority and agency are distributed among students, teachers, and AI tools during learning. Threads include authority in elementary science modeling, how students remix AI chatbots into dialogic tools, epistemic agency in student-LLM math problem solving, and analytics-supported reflective assessment for pre-service teachers.

Generative AI & Large Language Models 4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2700

Integrating Computer Science with Science Education

Six short papers on integrating computer science and computational thinking with science, math, and special education. Threads include an umbrella review of CT-math integration, AI as a creative-computing design partner, computing for special-education contexts, quantum computational thinking, and teachers designing physical-computing and robotics units.

Computational Thinking & CS Education 6 talks

Long Paper · ALP 3610

Computer Science Education

Four papers on how programming environments and AI are reshaping computer science education. Topics include balancing usability and expressiveness in block-based modeling, Parsons puzzles paired with self-explanation, teachers' shifting conceptions of AI/ML and algorithmic justice, and norms around when copying code is acceptable.

Computational Thinking & CS Education 4 talks

Short Paper · Barclay

Co-Design, Community-based education, sociocultural learning

Six short papers examine co-design and community-engaged education across undergraduate science, minority-owned small businesses, and intergenerational environmental-justice programs. Threads include enacting solidarity in community partnerships, collaborative data co-analysis, and culturally sustaining pedagogy through game redesign.

Co-Design & Participatory Design 6 talks

4:15 PM

1 option

Poster · Outdoors

ICLS Posters - Thursday Poster Session (In-Person)

An in-person poster session covering wide-ranging learning sciences research, including science and engineering teacher reasoning, AI in classrooms, and equity-oriented design in research-practice partnerships. Topics span heritage-language and algebra apps, urban gardens as educational technology, cognitive presence in MOOCs, and community-engaged research experiences.

Equity, Justice & Inclusion 91 talks