Thesis supervision

If you are interested in writing a bachelor/master’s thesis in the lab, please read this page carefully and complete the thesis interest form below.Tomo and postdocs/PhD students have access to your response to this form, we meet every month to discuss thesis applications. One of us will contact you within 4-6 weeks if we find a good match.

Requirements

There are no strict prerequisites for writing a thesis in the lab, but to write a good thesis, it is important that you have a background (e.g., degree, coursework, past research project…) in one or more of the fields below:

Learning Sciences/Education Science/Educational Technology (e.g., experience of designing instructional materials and tools)
Human-Computer Interaction/Computer Science (e.g., web development skills, user research skills and experiences)
Psychology/Cognitive Science (e.g., statistical analysis skills, advanced modeling, knowledge of measurements, experience conducting lab studies)

Also, it is recommended that you take one or more of our courses before or during the semester in which you will do the thesis seminar. Once we decide to work on a thesis together in the lab, you will need to take a bachelor/master seminar (graded – unless you are a student from the EduTech program) as part of your thesis writing. In this seminar, we meet once a month with other thesis-writing students to share progress and get feedback. We would also meet individually about 1-2 times a month to discuss the project. During this phase, you will define a research question, identify prior work, and learn about its theoretical basis. After this phase, you will decide on the method you will use and make a clear plan to collect and analyze data. Once you complete the seminar, your “writing period” will start. Note that doing a thesis (seminar + the writing period) in my lab typically takes 8-12 months. Also, please note that we almost always submit thesis projects to conferences and journals for publication (either you as a first author or co-author), and that means you have to put significant effort into the thesis research! Past thesis work has been published at leading HCI and Learning Sciences venues. Here are some example papers we co-authored with thesis students:

Types of thesis

In my lab, students write a thesis of one (or more) of the following types:

Design-focused (you’d engage in iterative (co-)design research with practitioners/community members to produce digital artifacts, which would be followed by user testing and/or simple evaluations. Or you would engage with community members to develop a deeper understanding of stakeholder views on certain topics in HCI/LS)
Experiment-focused (you’d design some kind of instructional principle or activities using technology and conduct an experiment to test its effectiveness, or use an existing system to test your own RQ by conducting an experiment)
Data analysis-focused (you’d analyze (existing) learning data and test hypotheses)

Thesis Topics

Mirella Hladký

2 open

Adaptive Mindful Math Tutor with Skill Modeling Multiple types possible — click for details ↓

Preferred background: CS/HCI

You will update our existing Mindful Math Tutor to make it fully adaptive so that students would get adaptive math anxiety interventions based on their anxiety level and skill mastery status in math. For realizing the adaptive emotion regulation support, individual student information must be fed to the tutoring system or an LLM embedded, using prompt engineering techniques. For the adaptive cognitive math learning support, you will implement Knowledge Components (skills) and build a skill model (some stats knowledge would be useful). You would run an experiment to test the effectiveness of this adaptive intervention.

Emotion-sensitive learning technologies and learning technologies that support emotion regulation Multiple types possible — click for details ↓

Preferred background: Psychology/HCI/Design/Learning Sciences, CS welcome if you have a strong interest in Psychology

In this open project, you can bring in your ideas on researching how to design learning technologies that consider learners’ emotional states, that foster a socio-emotionally supportive learning experience and/or support adaptive emotion regulation during learning. If you’re interested in these topics, please include your ideas in your motivation letter.

Meiyi Chen

2 open

Human–AI Collaboration for Developing Critical Skills Design-focused — click for details ↓

Preferred background: CS/HCI/Software development

In this open project, you will design, implement and evaluate an innovative AI-supported technology that aims to develop key 21st-century cognitive skills, including critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving, and creativity.
The AI-supported technology can take creative forms, such as an interactive platform or a gamified system with an AI agent, leveraging the strengths of AI (open to explore).

Human–AI Collaboration for Self-Regulated Learning Behavior Design-focused — click for details ↓

Preferred background: CS/HCI/Software development

In this open project, you will design, implement, and evaluate an innovative AI-supported technology that helps learners develop metacognitive and self-regulated learning (SRL) skills and promote positive behavioral change, such as productive learning habits and metacognitive routines.

Dr. Krithik Ranjan

1 open

Tangible and Material Interfaces for Creative Learning Design-focused — click for details ↓

Preferred background: CS, HCI, Design, Qualitative Research

In this open project, you will explore Computer Vision technologies and platforms to design, research, and evaluate tangible learning technologies for creative contexts to engage children with computational thinking, science and math concepts, critical thinking, and creativity.
We will work in co-design capacities with teachers and informal educators to develop and deploy situated learning tools for their environments.

Shintaro Sato

2 open

Human-AI hybridity in feedback giving in the classroom Multiple types possible — click for details ↓

Preferred background: Design/HCI/Learning Sciences

The project explores how we might support effective orchestration between human teachers and AI systems in school classrooms. You may design feedback messages in an AI-based tutoring system and/or conduct a school-based experiment to capture the role of human teachers in feedback giving in the classroom. Native-level German skill is required.

Understanding types of effective feedback messages within intelligent tutoring software Design-focused — click for details ↓

Preferred background: Learning Sciences/Psychology/HCI/Design

In this project, you will explore how to design effective feedback messages on ITS to enhance student learning and motivation. You will conduct a survey with storyboards to understand what kinds of feedback school teachers would give in several different situations, and design and implement a variety of feedback messages within an existing intelligent tutoring system.

Dr. Bingyi Han

1 open

Understanding Human-GenAI Learning Interactions that promotes critical thinking – Designing conversational AI systems for meaningful self-directed learning and reasoning Multiple types possible — click for details ↓

Preferred background: You love statistics and running experiments to see how human behave or respond differently to various AI interaction designs

In this type of project, you may work on prompt engineering with LLMs (or design simple conversational AI interaction prototypes), run experimental studies with real users, and develop evaluation measures for learning-related elements.
My broader research interest focuses on how conversational AI reshapes human learning, reasoning, agency, and decision-making during self-directed learning processes. Possible project directions may involve topics such as: learning agency and autonomy, trust and reliance on AI, human–AI co-reasoning, critical thinking and reflection, learning motivation and habits.
If you are interested in working with me, please include a brief initial research idea in your cover letter. This does not need to be fully developed, but it should include: your research aims or question, a possible research method (and how your background is relevant to that), and a rough timeline or plan. You can think of this as a mini research proposal. If you are unfamiliar with writing one, please do some initial self-learning and preparation before applying. (A tip: this is how you tell me what question you are curious about and convince me why it is an interesting and important research question to investigate.)
I will be happy to discuss and brainstorm with you once there is a concrete starting point.
You will gain hands-on experience in designing behavioural experiments with AI systems and studying how people learn with AI. If you are considering doing a PhD afterwards, please also mention this in your cover letter, so I can better support you in shaping a project that may grow into a PhD direction or prepare you for paper publication.

Prof. Dr. Tomohiro Nagashima

4 open

Conducting tutor log data analysis to find patterns of students’ choice-making behaviors during learning Data analysis-focused — click for details ↓

Preferred background: Data science/Psychology

In this project, you will use existing log data from a tutoring system to find meaningful patterns in student behaviors when they interact with the software. It involves some advanced statistical analyses, including but not limited to, linear regressions, logistic regressions, ML, and multi-level modeling.

How can we use LLMs to generate interactive mathematical learning activities? Design-focused — click for details ↓

Preferred background: You like to co-design with humans, to prototype activities, and conduct rigorous evaluations

In this project, you will develop a tool to generate meaningful and useful concrete examples for mathematics, for various age groups, spanning different types of concreteness in this taxonomy developed by Prof. Dr. Julia Chatain. If time allows, you will develop both a student-facing and a teacher-facing version of this tool. In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Julia Chatain at UniDistance Suisse.

Do learners with math anxiety feel more comfortable participating in embodied learning activities? Design-focused — click for details ↓

Preferred background: You have a background in educational psychology, you love to design learning interventions and conduct rigorous studies with humans

In this project, we will develop or adjust three prototypes of non-technological embodied learning interventions for mathematics. You will then conduct a study with students to evaluate how math anxiety impacts their willingness to participate in the embodied learning activity and their behaviors. You will reflect on these results based on your design choices. In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Julia Chatain at UniDistance Suisse.

Designing and testing an instructional intervention to promote metacognitive or domain-level learning in CS education Multiple types possible — click for details ↓

Preferred background: LS/Instructional Design/Design

In this collaborative project with the Machine Teaching Group at MPI-SWS, you will design and test (with students in Germany) an instruction intervention that aims to promote metacognitive or domain-level learning in the context of CS education (using https://www.blocksandpython.com/). Web dev skills are a plus, but not required.

Thesis Alumni

Students who completed their thesis in the lab and where they are now.

Requirements

Types of thesis

Thesis Topics

Mirella Hladký

Meiyi Chen

Dr. Krithik Ranjan

Shintaro Sato

Dr. Bingyi Han

Prof. Dr. Tomohiro Nagashima

Thesis Alumni