8th International Workshop on Culturally-Aware Tutoring Systems (CATS2026)

PRESENTATION

In her work in multicultural education, Margaret Pusch [19] defines culture as “a system of shared beliefs, values, norms, behaviors and artifacts that members of a group use to make sense of their world and relate to others.” Prior educational technology research has shown the importance of culturally-aware educational practices [8, 13] as well as in many learning-related domains such as cognition, motivation, and emotions [7, 11, 14, 15]. Hence, with the growing adoption of educational technologies, culture has become an increasingly important consideration for the AIED community. With the rapid advancement and development of AI, prior work has shown the potential for AI-mediated educational technologies to bridge educational and digital divides worldwide [4, 9, 18, 21]. Although most AI and educational technological systems have been primarily designed for the Developed World [2, 5, 16], an increasing number of these systems are designed with different contexts in mind [10, 13], and more and more intercultural evaluations are reported [1, 6, 17, 20].

Moreover, this year’s AIED conference calls for AI to co-evolve with learners, enabling richer human-AI interaction and synergy. As prior work has mainly focused on general technology adoption for education, greater attention is needed to understand how learners can draw on their lived experiences, contexts, culture, and realities in their interactions with AI-mediated technologies. Additionally, as recent publications have focused on large-scale efforts using AI to reach students in under-resourced and marginalized contexts [9, 12], there is a need to better understand how insights from their culture and contexts can drive culturally responsive human-AI partnerships in learning. 

Therefore, the 2026 edition of the CATS workshop aims to engage interested researchers in a conversation on how to take culture and context into account in the design and operations of learner-AI interactions and to address these questions:

• What features of culture are important to consider in the design process of AIED systems?

• Can educational technologies designed and developed in a specific cultural context transfer to other parts of the World and remain effective?

• How can we embed culturally-adaptive mechanisms into intelligent educational technologies?

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