Operation ARIES: Acquiring Research Investigative and Evaluative Skills

Diane Halpern is the author of a popular text on critical thinking and the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment; her coauthors Keith Millis and Arthur Graesser are the Project Director of Operation ARIES! and the Editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology, respectively. ARIES is an educational program that teaches scientific reasoning/critical thinking using principles from the science of learning and serious games. Students learn via an interactive text, which is followed with an automated tutoring session that involves two animated agents and the human student. Through a cover story that the world is being taken over by aliens who are using bad science, the program’s goal is to create durable learning that transfers across academic domains.