A persistent instructional challenge in any education domain is how to scaffold student learning. In the research area of an established instructional strategy called “self-explanation” (Chi et al., 1989), studies have not fully explored how self-explanation activities can be scaffolded so that students can learn and perform well. In this project, we designed a novel form of self-explanation called “anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation”. In anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation, students are asked to infer a good next problem-solving step before working on the step. 

The design of the interaction and the interface is based on the co-design work with middle-school teachers and user-testing with middle schoolers. We have been conducting (remote) classroom experiments, testing the effectiveness of the strategy.