Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Digital technologies have drastically transformed the way in which we communicate, visualize, and work with information,giving rise to new research areas, such as child-computer interaction (Read & Bekker, 2011) and computer-supportedcollaborative learning (Dillenbourg, Jrvel, & Fischer, 2009). Consequently, cognitive scientists are increasingly interestedin understanding how children think and learn with digital technologies (e.g., Greenfield & Yan, 2005). This study usesconcurrent think-aloud protocols to elicit childrens explanations of how they use analytic tools to support their learning onan online platform called Knowledge Forum (Scardamalia, 2017). After using Knowledge Forum for eight months (Ma &Akyea, 2019), five third-graders participated in 20-minute sessions to interpret their online activities using analytic tools(e.g., bar charts, sociograms, word clouds). Generally, they were cognizant of their online behaviours, and the tools raisedmetacognitive awareness toward productive social interactions. Practical implications for using analytic tools to supportself-regulated learning are discussed.