Bruce M. McLaren

McLaren has given keynote talks at a variety of educational technology conferences, including the Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute in 2019 (ALASI 2019), e-Learning Korea 2018, and the 24th International Conference on Computers in Education in 2016.

McLaren is a faculty member in Carnegie Mellon University’s METALS (Masters of Educational Technology and Applied Learning Sciences) program and has taught the METALS capstone course since 2016.

More recently, McLaren and his team have explored a variety of issues related to digital learning games, including student agency and the impact of feedback and hints on student learning. McLaren’s team has run studies in many middle schools in the local Pittsburgh area with these new research questions.

Collaborating with Professor Jodi Forlizzi, McLaren developed a digital learning game called Decimal Point to teach decimal fractions and decimal operations to middle school students. In 2017, they conducted a study, which involved 153 students from two middle schools, 70 students learned about decimals from playing Decimal Point, whereas 83 students learned the same content by a more conventional, computer-based approach. In the study, the game led to significantly better gain learning gains, on both an immediate and delayed posttest and was rated by the students as significantly more enjoyable. They later ran several replications of the study and achieved the same results. The replication studies also revealed that the game is more effective in teaching female students than male students.

McLaren's web-based argumentation workspace and variety of analysis techniques was later made widely available to a range of students and other researchers through another project, for which he was principal investigator, LASAD – Learning to Argue: Generalized Support Across Domains.

McLaren's parents are Thomas James McLaren, who died in 2012 and who was a Presbyterian minister, and Shirley Martin McLaren, a former high school English teacher. McLaren was married to Gabriele (nee Huber) McLaren from 1990 until their divorce in 2013. He has two sons, Patrick Bruce McLaren (born 1993) and Dominik Lukas McLaren (born 1997). McLaren is an avid outdoorsman and hiker; he hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in 1989.

McLaren was elected to the Executive Committee of the Artificial Intelligence in Education Society for a six-year term in 2011. From 2017 to 2019, he served as the President of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society.

In collaboration with colleagues and his students, McLaren has developed software tools, using the combination of AI and language analysis techniques, to analyze collaborative argumentation or e-discussions, to help classroom teachers guide multiple discussions and, consequently, to help students learn argumentation skills. In a paper published in 2010, he and his students showed that software classifiers can be created using machine-learning techniques to identify key constructs in online collaborative arguments. A teacher can use these constructs to guide students in debating and learning with one another.

McLaren is among the first educational technology researchers to extensively investigate the learning potential of interactive erroneous examples. In the early 2010s, he participated in several research projects that explored the instructional benefits of erroneous examples. He conducted classroom studies with middle school math students that revealed that students who worked with erroneous examples to learn decimals performed better on a delayed posttest than those who worked with problems to solve. With respect to correct worked examples, he and his colleagues later showed that worked examples can lead to as much learning but in significantly less time than erroneous examples, intelligently-tutored problems, and problems to solve in the domain of chemistry.

From 2006 to 2010, he worked as a visiting senior researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he did research on collaborative learning, argumentation and technology for analyzing collaborative argumentation. On both the ARGUNAUT and LASAD projects, his research was focused on developing educational technology, using AI techniques, to help teachers moderate collaborative e-Discussions and arguments.

Since 2005, McLaren has done research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and how technology can be leveraged to support constructivist learning. His initial work in collaborative learning involved the semi-automated development of intelligent tutors to support collaborative learning, learning of algebra through scripted dyad collaboration with Cognitive Tutors, and the learning of chemistry through scripted dyad collaboration with a virtual laboratory. This research supported the claim that collaborative learning can be improved with guidance, either explicit direction on steps to take or feedback on domain content, student actions, and/or collaboration.

Upon completing his B.S., McLaren began his career as a software engineer, working for General Electric for 2 years. Later, after completing his M.Sc. in 1984, McLaren joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a Project Supervisor in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory. In 1986 he joined Carnegie Group, an AI and expert systems company, as a Senior Consultant, where he was responsible for the company's expert systems projects in Europe. He later worked as a Senior Engineer and a Project Manager at the Carnegie Group in the United States until 1998. After completing his Ph.D. in 1999, McLaren joined OpenWebs Corporation where he first worked as the Director of Research and Development and then as the Director of eCommerce Technologies. In 2002, McLaren left OpenWebs to join Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a Systems Scientist. In 2015, he became an Associate Research Professor at CMU.

McLaren received a B.S. in Computer Science from Millersville University of Pennsylvania in 1981. He later attended the University of Pittsburgh where he received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1984 and an M.S. in Intelligent Systems in 1994. Finally, in 1999, McLaren received a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Assessing the Relevance of Cases and Principles Using Operationalization Techniques". His doctoral advisor was Kevin Ashley. A paper based on his Ph.D. thesis was published in the Artificial Intelligence Journal.

Bruce Martin McLaren (born 1959) is an American researcher, academic and author. He is an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a former President of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (2017-2019).