Ying Xu is an Assistant Professor of AI in Learning and Education at Harvard University. Her research focuses on designing AI technologies that promote language and literacy development, STEM learning, and wellbeing for children and families.

Ying Xu Research; CV; Toggle menu. Research I am carrying out research in several intersecting areas bridging psychology, education, and human-computer interaction. Large Language Models to Support Learning Through Storytelling. Our goal is to investigate the influence of large language models and generative AI on children’s education. ...

Mar 1, 2025 · Xu, Y., Vigil, V., Bustamante, & Warschauer, M. (2022). “Elinor’s talking to me!”: Integrating conversational AI into children’s science narrative programming. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Xu, Y., & Warschauer, M. (2020). Using conversational agents to foster young children’s science ...

Xu, Y. , He, K., Vigil, V., Ojeda-Ramirez, S., Liu, X., Levine, J., Cervera, K., & Warschauer, M. (2023). “Rosita Reads With My Family”: Developing A Bilingual Conversational Agent to Support Parent-Child Shared Reading.

Mar 4, 2022 · Reich, S., Yau, J., Xu, Y., Muskat, T., Campbell, J., & Cannata, D. (2019). Digital or print? Digital or print? A comparison of preschooler’s comprehension, vocabulary, and engagement from a print book and an eBook.

Yao, B., Wang, D., Wu, T., Zhang, Z., Li, T., Yu, M., & Xu, Y. (2022). It is AI’s Turn to Ask Humans a Question: Question and Answer Pair Generation for Children’s Storybooks with FairytaleQA Dataset.

Over several years, our focus has been on studying children’s engagement with “conversational AI.” Previously, these interactions involved AI asking children questions, children responding, and the AI evaluating their answers. Throughout our research, we have consistently discovered that this question-and-answer approach effectively supports …

Jan 10, 2022 · With funding from Schmidt Futures, I’m pleased to announce that my team has completed the development of a benchmark dataset of dialogic questions for children’s books. This dataset, FairytaleQA, consists of 10,000 from almost 300 public-domain books, covering seven types of narrative elements/relations. We believe that FairytaleQA will be valuable for the field of natural language ...

May 10, 2021 · Robert D Kalinowski, Ying Xu, and Katie Salen. 2021. The Ecological Context of Preschool-Aged Children’s Selection of Media Content. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘21) Check out this video preview, and read the full paper!

Jul 29, 2021 · We held our symposium, “Promoting Social Interaction in Young Children’s Digital Learning,” in the Connected Learning Summit. This symposium reviews three research projects focusing on the social aspects of young children’s digital learning. We discuss issues including the similarities and differences between child-agent and child …