Evaluating the quality of university exam papers is crucial for universities seeking institutional and program accreditation. Currently, exam papers are assessed manually, a process that can be tedious, lengthy, and in some cases, inconsistent. This is often due to the focus on assessing only the formal specifications of exam papers. This study…

Quality control and assurance plays a fundamental role within higher education contexts. One means by which quality control can be performed is by mapping the course learning outcomes (CLOs) to the program learning outcomes (PLO). This paper describes a system by which this mapping process can be automated and validated. The proposed AI-based…

In order to avoid students' negative learning mood, contemporary teachers are required to abandon the application of spoon-feeding teaching method in English classroom teaching, adopt micro-class teaching method, highlight the teaching characteristics of being close to the people, and create an efficient, short, and special teaching space to meet…

Background: Artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing (NLP), enables automating the formative assessment of written task solutions to provide adaptive feedback automatically. A laboratory study found that, compared with static feedback (an expert solution), adaptive feedback automated through artificial neural networks…

Purpose: Multiple methods have been suggested for quantifying syntactic complexity in speech. We compared eight automated syntactic complexity metrics to determine which best captured verified syntactic differences between old and young adults. Method: We used natural speech samples produced in a picture description task by younger (n = 76, ages…

Artificial Intelligence is a fast-evolving technology with enormous potential for education, higher education, and learning. AI can also negatively impact how societies and their citizens engage ethically with these generated, still-unexplored tools. These technological breakthroughs present both opportunity and potential peril. The problem of any…

Providing consistent, individualized feedback to teachers is essential for improving instruction but can be prohibitively resource-intensive in most educational contexts. We develop M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give teachers feedback on their uptake of student contributions, a high-leverage…

The programme outcomes are broad statements of knowledge, skills, and competencies that the students should be able to demonstrate upon graduation from a programme, while the Educational Taxonomy classifies learning objectives into different domains. The precise mapping of a course outcomes to the programme outcome and the educational taxonomy…

The current study explores the ability to predict argumentative claims in structurally-annotated student essays to gain insights into the role of argumentation structure in the quality of persuasive writing. Our annotation scheme specified six types of argumentative components based on the well-established Toulmin's model of argumentation. We…

Background: This exploratory writing analytics study uses argumentative writing samples from two performance contexts--standardized writing assessments and university English course writing assignments--to compare: (1) linguistic features in argumentative writing; and (2) relationships between linguistic characteristics and academic performance…

Assessment is a key component of education. Routine grading of students' work, however, is time consuming. Automating the grading process allows instructors to spend more of their time helping their students learn and engaging their students with more open-ended, creative activities. One way to automate grading is through computer-based…

Various studies empirically proved the value of highly informative feedback for enhancing learner success. However, digital educational technology has yet to catch up as automated feedback is often provided shallowly. This paper presents a case study on implementing a pipeline that provides German-speaking university students enrolled in an…

Online collaborative learning is implemented extensively in higher education. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to help learners achieve high-level group performance, knowledge elaboration, and socially shared regulation in online collaborative learning. To cope with these challenges, this study proposes and evaluates a novel automated…

Automated essay scoring (AES) has become a valuable tool in educational settings, providing efficient and objective evaluations of student essays. However, the majority of AES systems have primarily focused on native English speakers, leaving a critical gap in the evaluation of non-native speakers' writing skills. This research addresses this gap…

Peer assessment has been widely applied across diverse academic fields over the last few decades, and has demonstrated its effectiveness. However, the advantages of peer assessment can only be achieved with high-quality peer reviews. Previous studies have found that high-quality review comments usually comprise several features (e.g., contain…