Docent: transforming personal intuitions to scientific hypotheses through content learning and process training

People's lived experiences provide intuitions about health. Can they transform these personal intuitions into testable hypotheses that could inform both science and their lives? This paper introduces an online learning architecture and provides system principles for people to brainstorm causal scientific theories. We describe the Learn-Train-Ask workflow that guides participants through learning domain-specific content, process training to frame their intuitions as hypotheses, and collaborating with anonymous peers to brainstorm related questions. 344 voluntary online participants from 27 countries created 399 personally-relevant questions about the human microbiome over 4 months, 75 (19%) of which microbiome experts found potentially scientifically novel. Participants with access to process training generated hypotheses of better quality. Access to learning materials improved the questions' microbiome-specific knowledge. These results highlight the promise of performing personally-meaningful scientific work using massive online learning systems.

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