Conrad Borchers (2026) — EC-TEL 2026 📄 Full text (arXiv)
Borchers (2026) reports on a 90-minute participatory design workshop with 12 U.S. middle school mathematics teachers using i-Ready Math weekly. Thematic analysis identified four recurring dimensions of low student persistence: motivation and buy-in, cognitive roadblocks, resilience under challenge, and contextual barriers. Teachers emphasized the need to identify where students become stuck and recognize silent disengagement, prioritizing support for diagnosis and timely instructional response over aggregate usage metrics. This reframes the '5% problem' from an analytics gap to a situated instructional challenge, suggesting that teacher-role and teacher-ai-adoption-confidence must be centered when designing adaptive-learning systems for k-12 contexts. The work connects to student-experience research and engagement-metrics by arguing that teacher-facing systems supporting interpretation of persistence through both cognitive and contextual evidence are needed.
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