One important goal of instruction is to support students’ self-regulated choice making during learning. How might we support students’ strategic choice-making behaviors? In my dissertation, I co-designed with middle-school students a metacognitive intervention package that included an interactive tutorial, adaptive recommendations, and a learner-facing dashboard to support students’ self-regulated choice making when learning algebra with visual scaffolding (i.e., when to use the visual scaffold to aid problem solving).

A classroom experiment found that students whose choices were supported with the intervention package showed strategic choice-making behaviors (i.e., used the visual scaffold less frequently overall, and rather used when they “needed” the scaffold) and learned greater conceptual and procedural knowledge in algebra.

Below you can try the platform that I used for this study, in which students learn algebra problem solving with or without using visual scaffolding.