Bruce M. McLaren

Bruce Martin McLaren (born 1959 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American researcher, scientist and author.

McLaren received a B.S. in Computer Science (cum laude) from Millersville University of Pennsylvania in 1981.

He later attended the University of Pittsburgh, with financial support from a teaching assistantship, where he received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1984 and an M.S. in Intelligent Systems in 1994.

in 1984, McLaren joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a Research Programmer and then 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.

Part of McLaren's graduate studies were supported by a Mellon Fellowship (between 1998 and 1999).

He later worked as a Senior Engineer and a Project Manager at the Carnegie Group in the United States until 1998.

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.

McLaren published a paper based on his Ph.D. in the Artificial Intelligence Journal.

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.

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.

Since 2005, McLaren has done research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and how technology can be leveraged to support constructivist learning.

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.

McLaren was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society for a six-year term in 2011.

In 2015, he became an Associate Research Professor at CMU.

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.

McLaren's research is focused in three areas of educational technology: learning with digital learning games; learning to argue and reason through computer-mediated collaborative learning; and learning with interactive worked and erroneous examples.

McLaren has also done fundamental research in how ethical reasoning can be implemented through artificial intelligence techniques, what is sometimes referred to as “machine ethics".

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.

He is an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a former President of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (2017-2019).

McLaren's scientific research is focused on exploring how students learn with digital learning games (also called educational games), intelligent tutoring systems, e-learning principles, and collaborative learning.

His dissertation research involved building a computational model of ethical reasoning.

He has written or co-written over 200 academic articles and holds five patents.

From 2017 to 2019, he served as the President of the society.

During his tenure as president, McLaren instituted annual (versus bi-annual) society conferences, started the bi-annual Lifetime Achievement Awards and worked toward a more diverse society, regarding gender, race, and geography.

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 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.

More recently, McLaren and his team have explored a variety of issues related to digital learning games, including student agency, gender effects, game-based educational data mining, 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.

In 2023 McLaren authored a book chapter for the Handbook on AI in Education on how Artificial Intelligence has been used in digital learning games.

McLaren's lab also explored the use of an LLM (ChatGPT) as a means of responding to prompted self-explanation in the context of Decimal Point.

As President, McLaren was quoted in a 2019 article about AI in the classroom in a PBS article In 2021, McLaren was again elected to the Executive Committee of the society.

McLaren has given keynote talks at a variety of educational technology conferences, including the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology, and Education (TALE 2021) in Wuhan, China, 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 in Mumbai, India.