As any group-work member can attest, conveying information, and confirming understanding among group members can be a challenging first step in problem-solving. Despite being a ubiquitous strategy employed in many educational and organizational settings, there are collaborations that fall flat while others succeed. Recent strides have been made in the psycholinguistic approach to communication, evaluating the extent to which speakers align across lexical, syntactic, and semantic usages of language within various task environments, but gaps remain in understanding the role of language in open-ended, emergent problem-solving spaces. Study 1 examines the specific trends and functions of lexical, syntactic, and semantic alignment among speakers in a complex, creative problem-solving effort. As collaborators work through their tasks, lexical alignment decreases as semantic alignment increases and syntactic re-use decreases. These findings suggest alignment may be a sensitive mechanism that hinges on time spent in a collaborative environment and the influencing factor of goal type. More research is needed to understand the varying mechanisms across unique problem-solving spaces that vary in complexity, silence of referents, and cognitive load placed upon performers. Follow-up analyses explore how speakers use specific terms in their collaborative dialogues, assessing the roles of cognition- and action-related language. The use of thinking words (e.g. “think”, “wonder”) predicts when participants may hit an impasse in their collaborations. One interpretation suggests that cognition-related language tends to be involved when groups struggle to convey ideas. Findings from the current work have implications for interventions in organizational and educational domains, along with potential artificial intelligence applications.

Science education faces a distinct challenge in the transition to active learning: how can teachers ensure students reach accurate understandings during the exploration and self-discovery phase of a lesson? Research in hypothesis generation demonstrates human's vulnerabilities to specific biases based on prior knowledge, selective memory retrieval, and failure to consider alternative explanations. This is further complicated in science education, where content standards are abstract. As such, it is imperative to implement a proactive intervention to curb misconceptions from forming during active learning in science lessons. In this work, a new a model of instruction, Question-Based Learning (QBL) is designed and tested against current learning paradigms. The study aims to investigate whether providing constraint-seeking questions is an effective intervention leading to improved mastery of learning targets during active learning. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions to learn a scientific concept: a blended learning condition, a guided-inquiry condition, or a QBL condition. Mastery was measured at the end of the task using a 12-question assessment. The same measure was also administered one week after subjects completed the study to see whether delayed recall significantly differs between condition groups. Results indicate the QBL model is at least as effective two existing forms of pedagogy at teaching a scientific principle, increasing depth of knowledge regarding that scientific principle, and sustaining knowledge over time.

Exploratory Play is a universal experience that occurs throughout different kinds of childhoods. This study investigates how children’s vocabulary and exploratory play are influenced by how the caregiver responds to the child’s communicative bids. We hypothesize that if caregivers use more open-ended questions in response to their child’s communicative bids, children will show higher rates of exploration during free play.

Curiosity has been linked with many benefits, including increased overall well-being (Lydon-Staley et al., 2020) and greater academic achievement (Gottfried et al., 2016). The value that children place on learning new things and exploring novel ideas is unrivaled by older individuals. However, little research has been conducted to examine how parents may be able to help foster their children’s curiosity in a way that teaches them how to effectively search for and synthesize information. This paper aims to determine how parents’ language during a storybook task is related to their children’s strategy to collect rewards during a search game. Preliminary results suggest that parents may be able to encourage more effective search by asking more close-ended questions. These findings provide insight into how parents and guardians may be able to encourage their children to become better adept at searching for information by taking in clues about their environment and modifying their behavior to maximize their efforts.