Mind wandering—shifts of attention toward task-unrelated thoughts—is common during educational activities and reliably predicts poorer learning outcomes. However, measures of mind wandering were developed for simple attention tasks and do not capture the complexity of learners’ cognitive processes. In learning contexts, students also engage in productive thoughts such as elaboration, integration, and metacognitive monitoring. Existing measurement instruments often misclassify learning-relevant thoughts as mind wandering or as forms of interference, limiting interpretability and constraining the questions researchers can address.

This project aims to develop and validate a new thought-report template specifically designed for learning contexts, capable of distinguishing mind wandering from other cognitive processes that support learning. A theory-driven qualitative analysis of existing data collected from video-lecture tasks will be conducted to develop the new thought-template. Then, validation studies will be conducted with the new template in both German and English. The project will yield a rigorously validated instrument that enables more accurate measurement of learners’ thought processes, clearly separating mind wandering from other types of thoughts that are not directly tied to the immediate learning material, but still support learning.