Conference Agenda

Topic: AI chatbots in STEM education
The study is designed to address the following research questions:
RQ1: What is the relationship between students’ use of AI bots and academic achievements in STEM subjects (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math) when controlled for such variables as gender, technology literacy, extracurricular activities, level of teachers’ support, self-directed learning, and access to resources?
RQ2: What is the relationship between students’ use of AI-bots and academic motivation in STEM subjects (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math) when controlled for such variables as gender, technology literacy, extracurricular activities, level of teachers’ support, self-directed learning, and access to resources?
RQ3: How do students use chat-bots to facilitate their independent learning in STEM subjects (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math)?
Objective: This study investigates the impact of AI-bot usage on students’ academic achievements and motivation in secondary STEM education, with a specific focus on Kazakhstan as an emerging AI-in-education context.

Theoretical framework:
The study is grounded in Self-Determination Theory (STD) (Deci & Ryan, 1985) and Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) (Bandura, 1986; 1999). SDT explains how AI-supported learning environments may enhance intrinsic motivation by supporting autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000), while SCT highlights the role of self-efficacy in shaping academic engagement and performance (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020). Together, these frameworks allow for an integrated analysis of cognitive, motivational, and contextual factors influencing learning outcomes in AI-mediated environments.
While most empirical research on AI chatbots in education is concentrated in Western or East-Asian contexts, evidence from Central Asia remains limited. This study contributes internationally relevant data from Kazakhstan, offering comparative insights for European education systems facing similar challenges related to ethical AI use, equity, academic integrity, and policy alignment.

English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education presents a set of interrelated challenges and areas that influence effective learning. Based on a systematic synthesis of the literature by Ponomarevskyi and Horbacauskiene (manuscript under review), six key domains of effective learning in EMI were identified: psychological, linguistic, cognitive, pedagogical, sociocultural, and organizational. These domains are associated with key educational components affected by EMI, including student academic performance, teaching quality, and EMI programme feasibility. The domains are conceptualised as interrelated rather than independent. In particular, organizational and sociocultural conditions are understood to shape pedagogical practices, while pedagogical and linguistic practices influence students’ cognitive and psychological processes involved in learning in EMI settings (Li et al., 2024; Macaro et al., 2020; Mittelmeier et al., 2021; Morell et al., 2022a, 2022b; Tai & Tang, 2020).

The study adopts a multilingual perspective on EMI, focusing on practices such as the use of L1 learning materials, code-switching, translingual strategies, and pedagogical sensitivity to linguistic and cultural diversity. From this perspective, effective learning in EMI is conceptualised as the alignment of teaching methods with intended learning outcomes, alongside favourable learner perceptions and supportive instructional and institutional environments. Such alignment is expected to influence how learners engage cognitively and metacognitively with disciplinary content delivered through an additional language (de Diezmas et al., 2024; Richards & Pun, 2022; Williams, 2024).

These considerations give rise to the following research question: How can curriculum development benefit the effective learning of higher education bachelor students in an English-medium instruction (EMI) setting?

To answer this question, the study sets out the following objectives:

1. To examine how students’ lived experiences and university professors’ instructional practices shape effective EMI learning in university classrooms.

2. To outline the key factors for improving overall academic performance and teaching in EMI university programmes.

3. To determine teaching practices and learning strategies having the most significant potential to enhance academic outcomes in EMI contexts.

The theoretical foundations of effective EMI learning in this study draw on several established frameworks. Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is used to conceptualise learning outcomes as progressing from basic knowledge acquisition to higher-order analytical and evaluative skills. Constructivist theory posits that learners develop deeper understanding when they actively construct meaning through interaction and engagement rather than passively receive information (Piaget, 1952; Vygotsky, 1978). Metacognitive theory highlights the role of learners’ awareness and regulation of their own learning processes, including monitoring, self-regulation, and reflection, which are particularly salient in linguistically demanding EMI contexts (Flavell, 1976). Cognitive Load Theory further informs the framework by emphasising the importance of instructional design that minimises extraneous cognitive load and supports learners’ processing of essential content in a second language (Sweller, 1988).

Taken together, these perspectives inform a provisional conceptual framework that guides the present research by sensitising the analysis to how different domains of EMI learning interact and how pedagogical and linguistic practices mediate learners’ cognitive and psychological engagement. At this pre-empirical stage, the framework serves as an exploratory and theory-informed guide for the formulation of research questions and the design of the empirical study. It will be refined following data collection and analysis to better reflect the relationships observed in the specific EMI context under investigation.

This paper addresses the ECER 2026 theme Knowing and Acting by examining how gender education operates as a form of biopolitical governance and how marginalized youth respond through embodied practices that challenge dominant educational rationalities. While gender education is internationally promoted as a progressive tool for social justice, equality, and inclusion, critical scholarship across Europe and beyond has shown that such initiatives may also reproduce normative expectations regarding subjectivity, communication, and citizenship. This study contributes to these debates by foregrounding the frictions that arise when institutionalized gender knowledge encounters culturally, classed, and historically situated forms of embodied experience.

The research is guided by three interrelated questions:

1. How does gender education function as biopolitical governance in everyday pedagogical practice?
   Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, this study asks how gender education governs not only through policies and curricula, but through subtle pedagogical norms—such as expectations of verbal articulation, reflexive self-disclosure, and rational consensus—that define what counts as legitimate gender knowledge.

2. What forms of epistemic and embodied friction emerge when such governance encounters Indigenous and working-class youth?
   In formal educational settings, marginalized students are often described as silent, disengaged, or resistant. Rather than interpreting these responses as deficits, this research investigates how silence, withdrawal, humor, and non-verbal action can be understood as embodied resistance to gender discourses shaped by middle-class and colonial assumptions. This question resonates with European discussions on educational inequality, migrant youth, and postcolonial critique, where misrecognition of embodied knowledge remains a persistent issue.

3. How can “acting” open alternative modes of knowing that reconfigure gender education toward healing rather than normalization?
   The study explores how alternative pedagogical arrangements—specifically board game workshops—enable forms of acting that suspend dominant regimes of knowing. It asks how such practices allow participants to negotiate gendered power, boundaries, and responsibility through action rather than moralized discourse, and what this implies for rethinking gender education as a site of relational repair.

The theoretical framework integrates four key strands. First, biopolitical governance provides an analytic lens for understanding gender education as a technology that produces governable subjects aligned with normative ideals of gender equality. Second, border thinking (Mignolo,2018) situates the research at the epistemic border where modern, universalized knowledge encounters local, subaltern, and historically marginalized ways of knowing. Third, the concept of intermediate objects (from Wangliang Asks Jing II: Intermediate Objects) foregrounds material and affective mediators—such as board games—that enable learning to occur in the grey zone between governance and resistance, identity and becoming. Finally, healing politics reframes healing not as individual therapy, but as a collective, relational, and political process that emerges when normative pressures are temporarily lifted.

By positioning Taiwan as a case that speaks to broader international concerns—such as the governance of diversity, the limits of rights-based education, and the decolonization of knowledge—this paper contributes to European and global debates on gender, education, and social justice. It argues that attending to friction and embodied action is crucial for reimagining how education can respond ethically and politically to contemporary poly-crisis.

Contemporary STEM education frameworks emphasise fostering curiosity alongside scientific inquiry skills to cultivate evidence-based reasoning, intrinsic motivation, and lifelong scientific engagement. Curiosity in science manifests as a drive to explore phenomena, seek explanations, and tolerate uncertainty, while scientific inquiry skills include formulating investigable questions, constructing testable hypotheses, designing experiments, analysing data, and drawing evidence-based conclusions. These align with European priorities for inquiry-based science education (European Commission, 2021) and international benchmarks such as PISA scientific literacy.

In Kazakhstan, secondary STEM instruction often remains transmissive, prioritising algorithmic tasks and confirmatory labs over curiosity-driven exploration. This limits authentic inquiry, conceptual depth, and motivational persistence. National reforms advocate inquiry-oriented, competency-based approaches; yet, empirical evidence on their impact in fostering both curiosity and inquiry skills remains scarce, especially in innovative NIS settings piloting international curricula.

This quasi-experimental study addresses the research question:

To what extent does guided inquiry-based learning in 10th-grade chemistry lessons enhance students’ science curiosity, scientific inquiry skills (question formulation, hypothesis construction, data analysis), conceptual understanding, and engagement compared to conventional instruction?

Grounded in social constructivism, guided inquiry provides structured scaffolding to activate curiosity through authentic phenomena while progressively building autonomy (Pedaste et al., 2015). In chemistry, guided inquiry situates learning in real-world contexts (e.g., everyday material properties and reactions), sparking epistemic curiosity and procedural skills.

European and international meta-analyses confirm guided inquiry's positive effects on inquiry competencies, conceptual gains, and motivational outcomes, including curiosity (Lazonder & Harmsen, 2016; Furtak et al., 2012). This study aligns with European Schoolnet inquiry principles while contextualising findings within Kazakhstan’s NIS innovation ecosystem, contributing evidence for inquiry reforms in Central Asian STEM education and transferable insights for post-Soviet systems.

Rural higher education scholarship in the United States, U.S., has grown significantly over the last five decades but remains uneven, fragmented, and dominated by urban-centric assumptions (Grant et al., 2024). Despite rural areas covering more than 90% of the North American landmass and housing roughly one-quarter of the populations(Barkey & Renaud, 2025; Dobis, 2021), studies often portray rural students through deficit-oriented, homogenizing lenses (Bell, 1992; Koricich et al., 2018; Showalter et al., 2023; Stotzer, 2012). This creates a gap between the lived realities of rural communities and the knowledge produced about them. Using a thematic literature review approach, this paper examines rural higher education scholarship primarily in the U.S. Thirty peer-reviewed studies were critically assessed to identity recurring themes, with supporting documentation from state and federal governments and historical texts used to contextualize the findings. Three major themes emerged as central pillars shaping understandings of rurality within the higher education landscape: “access and equity,” “identity and community,” and “academic preparedness.

This paper critically examines the role of institutions of higher education in perpetuating narratives of absence, homogenized constructions of rurality, and the systemic exclusion of rural communities as legitimate knowledge producers. To illuminate how these dynamics operate and to guide analysis, the paper is organized around three research questions:

1. How has higher education scholarship conceptualized rural students and communities through the dominant tenets of access and equity, identity and community, and academic preparedness?
2. Which knowledge actors (scholars, policy institutions, philanthropic organizations) shape the definition of “rural” within higher education research, and how does this influence the marginalization of rural voices?
3. What urban-normative assumptions shape these bodies of scholarship, and how do they constrain understandings of rural identity, success, and belonging?

The paper pursues four interrelated objectives. First, it maps the existing literature through a thematic review of 30 peer-reviewed studies to examine how the three dominant tenets are framed and linked. Second, it interrogates epistemic authority, by tracing who is recognized as legitimate knowledge producers and how their positionalities reinforce urban-normative narratives. Third, it develops a revised analytical framework that foregrounds rural identity as a distinct, non-deficit construct and proposes concrete pathways for community-partnered research. Finally, the paper generates actionable recommendations for higher education practitioners and scholars to redesign access, identity, and preparedness initiatives and outreach that respect local rural heterogeneity.

While grounded primarily in U.S.-based scholarship, the concerns raised in this paper extend well beyond the American context. Across Europe and other international higher education systems, rural and peripheral regions face parallel challenges related to spatial inequality, demographic decline, limited institutional access, and urban-centered policy design. By foregrounding urbanormativity as a transnational analytical lens, this paper offers a framework that can be adapted across national contexts to examine how rural students are positioned within diverse national systems. This paper invites comparative and place-based approaches that recognize rural communities as active participants in knowledge creation rather than peripheral beneficiaries of higher education policy.