He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University[1] in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, head of the McLearn Lab,[2] and a former President of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (2017-2019).

McLaren is also a co-founder, along with Vincent Aleven, of Mathtutor,[4] a free website for middle-school math intelligent tutoring systems.

McLaren joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a Research Programmer and then Project Supervisor in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory.

On both the ARGUNAUT and LASAD projects, his research was focused on developing educational technology, using AI techniques, to help teachers moderate collaborative e-Discussions and arguments.

[12][13] McLaren was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society for a six-year term in 2011.

[33] In 2023 McLaren, along with his PhD student Huy Nguyen, authored a book chapter for the Handbook on AI in Education on how Artificial Intelligence has been used in digital learning games.

[34] McLaren's lab has also explored the use of a large language model (LLM - ChatGPT) as a means of responding to prompted self-explanation in the context of Decimal Point.

In a paper published in 2010, he and his students showed that software classifiers can be created using machine-learning techniques to identify key constructs in online collaborative arguments.

[39] McLaren and his team have focused on developing analysis and feedback techniques, which leverage the structure, order, and textual contributions of arguments, so that the teacher has information to guide and advise the collaborating groups.

McLaren and colleagues used graph matching, machine learning, and language processing techniques to analyze e-discussions from high school ethics and university education classrooms.

[40] Ultimately, both DOCE and the combined machine learning/text mining approach are used in the context of the ARGUNAUT system to provide "alerts" so that a teacher can, at a glance, see and react to problems in the e-discussions.

[41] McLaren's web-based argumentation workspace and variety of analysis techniques was later made widely available to a range of students and other researchers through another project, for which he, along with Niels Pinkwart,[42] was principal investigator, LASAD – Learning to Argue: Generalized Support Across Domains.

[47] McLaren has also collaborated with Professor Ryan Baker, an expert in educational data mining, and other colleagues on analyzing the affective states of students as they learn from erroneous examples.

McLaren also wrote a journal article describing both his dissertation research and his earlier work on an ethical reasoning system called TRUTH-TELLER.