ISLS 2026 Agenda

Tuesday, June 16 · 8 sessions

2:00 PM

1 option

Arts Gallery & Performance

Arts Gallery & Performance - Static Installations All Week

A week-long static gallery of arts-based installations exploring learning through the body, culture, materials, and emerging technology. Works span trans body politics and abolitionist imaginaries, immersive VR/AR and digital reading, and craft-based math via crochet, paper, and youth creative computing with community data art.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

30 talks

2:30 PM

2 options scroll

Long Paper · ALP 3600

Play and Games

Long papers on play, games, and young children's mathematics, including how kindergarteners negotiate teacher-designed playworlds and how teacher-child tensions during math play become sites of learning. Other talks present a three-prong framework for theory-based math games and the design of transformational games for socio-ethical reasoning about generative AI.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 3610

Dialogue and Collaboration

Papers on dialogue and collaboration across varied settings, including relational attunement in making, medical students shifting from cooperation to true collaboration, and parents revoicing to guide children's computational thinking. Further talks examine how language shapes access to tools and how productive confusion unfolds during VR collaboration.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

5 talks

4:30 PM

5 options scroll

Long Paper · ALP 1100

Analyzing Student Explanations

Researchers analyze how students articulate and develop their reasoning across science and math, drawing on knowledge-in-pieces and responsive teaching to trace intuitive resources in electromagnetism and evolution. The session also covers participation in optional self-explanation tasks and NGSS-aligned formative assessments that make first graders' life-science reasoning visible.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Agency, Equity, and Social Justice in Learning Sciences

Short papers on agency, equity, and social justice in learning, including epistemic engagement in multilingual science, rule-breaking as a design affordance, and frameworks for hands-on open science in K-5. Other talks trace racialized assemblages in AP biology, recognition for minoritized STEM instructors, and infrastructuring for climate justice in making.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2100

AI Literacy, AI Tools

Short papers on AI literacy and AI tools across learners and educators, from students' mental models shaping epistemic cognition of AI results to teachers' feedback strategies with intelligent tutoring systems. Other talks cover teachers' uptake of AI in climate education, neural-network simulations for educators, AI literacy with children, and bibliometric trends in STEM.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

6 talks

Long Paper · ALP 3600

Data Literacy and Computational Thinking

Long papers on data literacy and computational thinking, from comparing how students engage data practices in agricultural STEM to exploring spatiotemporal data through a space-time cube interface. Additional work operationalizes epistemic data agency at a data-storytelling camp and uses paper-based aids to support computational problem-solving with robotics.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 3610

Teacher Learning and AI

Four papers examine how teachers develop AI literacy and capacity, from an activity-theoretical study of why educators disengage from building AI agents to Knowledge Building professional development through design thinking. Other talks propose a socio-cognitive framework for K-8 AI literacy and analyze shared epistemic agency when teachers co-plan AI-integrated lessons with generative tools.

Early Childhood & Elementary Learning in a talk

4 talks