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Historically, learning for young students has occurred in formal, in-person classroom environments. But in just a matter of weeks, children were mandated to transition to a completely new mode of learning, facing new learning challenges with heightened anxieties. To this end, we aim to better understand how our learning experience design (LXD) efforts support or hinder children’s engagement while participating in an online, video-based math course. This study operationalized LXD through the integration of e-learning instructional design (ID) as a lever for promoting students’ situational interest (SI), emphasis on human-centered design to support students’ user experience (UX), and the combination of SI and UX to foster student engagement in an online environment. Results provide practical implications for how we can intentionally iterate our designs to sustain children’s online engagement as we prepare for future instances of traditional, online and even hybrid models of instruction. 

Undergraduates’ distress has increased dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, raising concerns for academic achievement. Yet little is known about the mechanisms by which pandemic-related distress may affect students’ learning and performance, and consequently, how we might intervene to promote student achievement despite the continuing crisis. Across two studies with nearly 700 undergraduates, we highlight the mediating role of distraction: undergraduates higher in COVID-19 distress saw lower learning gains from an asynchronous neuroscience lesson due to increased mind wandering during the lesson. We replicate and extend this finding in Study 2: probing what pandemic-related stressors worried students and revealing systematic differences among students of marginalized identities, with largest impacts on first-generation, Latinx women. We also examined whether stress reappraisal or mindfulness practices may mitigate the observed distress-to-distraction pathway. Only mindfulness reduced mind wandering, though this did not translate to learning. We conclude with implications for practice and future research. 

Reasoning about visual representations in science requires the ability to control one’s attention, inhibit attention to irrelevant or incorrect information, and hold information in mind while manipulating it actively—all aspects of the limited-capacity cognitive system described as humans’ executive functions. This article describes pedagogical intuitions on best practices for how to sequence visual representations among pre-service teachers, adult undergraduates, and middle school children, with learning also tested in the middle school sample. Interestingly, at all ages, most people reported beliefs about teaching others that were different from beliefs about how they would learn. Teaching beliefs were most often that others would learn better from presenting representations one at a time, serially; while learning beliefs were that they themselves would learn best from simultaneous presentations. Students did learn best from simultaneously presented representations of mitosis and meiosis, but only when paired with self-explanation prompts to discuss the relationships between the graphics. These results provide new recommendations for helping students draw connections across visual representations, particularly mitosis and meiosis, and suggest that science educators would benefit from shifting their teaching beliefs to align with beliefs about their own learning from multiple visual representations.