This dissertation focuses on strategies and techniques to enhance code comprehension skills among students enrolled in introductory computer science courses (CS1 and CS2). We propose a novel tutoring system, "DeepCodeTutor," designed to improve the code comprehension abilities of novices. DeepCodeTutor employs scaffolded self-explanation…

Background: Over the past few decades, the process and methodology of automatic question generation (AQG) have undergone significant transformations. Recent progress in generative natural language models has opened up new potential in the generation of educational content. Objectives: This paper explores the potential of large language models…

Free text answers to short questions can reflect students' mastery of concepts and their relationships relevant to learning objectives. However, automating the assessment of free text answers has been challenging due to the complexity of natural language. Existing studies often predict the scores of free text answers in a "black box"…

With the increasing popularity of open educational resources in the past few decades, more and more users watch online videos to gain knowledge. However, most educational videos only provide monotonous navigation tools and lack elaborating annotations. This makes the task of locating interesting contents time consuming. To address this limitation,…

Background: Despite the usefulness of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, they are time-consuming and labor-intensive (Michelson & Reuter, 2019). The technological advancements in recent years have led to the development of tools aimed at streamlining the processes of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Innovations such as Paperfetcher…

Multiple-choice question (MCQ) plays a significant role in educational assessment. Automatic MCQ generation has been an active research area for years, and many systems have been developed for MCQ generation. Still, we could not find any system that generates accurate MCQs from school-level textbook contents that are useful in real examinations.…

Automated scoring for divergent thinking (DT) seeks to overcome a key obstacle to creativity measurement: the effort, cost, and reliability of scoring open-ended tests. For a common test of DT, the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), the primary automated approach casts the problem as a semantic distance between a prompt and the resulting idea in a text…

Checking essays written by students is a very time consuming task. Besides spellings and grammar, they also need to be evaluated on their semantic content such as cohesion, coherence, etc. In this study we focus on one such aspect of semantic content which is the topic of the essay. Putting it formally, given a prompt or essay-statement and an…

The automatic code generation is the process of generating source code snippets from a program, i.e., code for generating code. Its importance lies in facilitating software development, particularly important is helping in the implementation of software designs such as engineering diagrams, in such a case, automatic code generation copes with the…

Background: When learning causal relations, completing causal diagrams enhances students' comprehension judgements to some extent. To potentially boost this effect, advances in natural language processing (NLP) enable real-time formative feedback based on the automated assessment of students' diagrams, which can involve the correctness of both the…

Open-ended questions in mathematics are commonly used by teachers to monitor and assess students' deeper conceptual understanding of content. Student answers to these types of questions often exhibit a combination of language, drawn diagrams and tables, and mathematical formulas and expressions that supply teachers with insight into the processes…

Theories of discourse argue that comprehension depends on the coherence of the learner's mental representation. Our aim is to create a reliable automated representation to estimate readers' level of comprehension based on different productions, namely self-explanations and answers to open-ended questions. Previous work relied on Cohesion Network…

Digitalization and automation of test administration, score reporting, and feedback provision have the potential to benefit large-scale and formative assessments. Many studies on automated essay scoring (AES) and feedback generation systems were published in the last decade, but few connected AES and feedback generation within a unified framework.…

The creation of a process model is primarily a formalization task that faces the challenge of constructing a syntactically correct entity, which accurately reflects the semantics of reality, and is understandable to the model reader. This article proposes a framework called "Model Judge," focused toward the two main actors in the process…

E-learning plays a significant role in educating large number of students. In the delivery of e-learning material, automatic e-assessment has been applied only to some extent in the case of free response answers in highly technical diagrams in domains like software engineering, electronics, etc., where there is a great scope of imagination and…