English speaking is considered the most difficult and anxiety-provoking language skill for EFL learners due to lack of access to authentic language use, fear of making mistakes, and peers' negative comments. With automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have potential in foreign language…

Differentiated instruction is much demanded yet quite challenging in face of the growing student diversity in today's K-12 classrooms. One major challenge is the provision of differentiated materials to students. Automated text simplification (ATS) tools fueled by natural language processing may serve as a useful assistant for teachers. However,…

Collaborative dialogue offers rich insights into students' learning and critical thinking. This is essential for adapting pedagogical agents to students' learning and problem-solving skills in STEM+C settings. While large language models (LLMs) facilitate dynamic pedagogical interactions, potential hallucinations can undermine confidence, trust,…

Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

Teaching axiomatic representation of mathematical objects in all grades can and should be done. The paper analyzes students' understanding and how they perceive theorems using problem posing. We looked at how English-language learners create questions about four geometric theorems from a 9th-grade math textbook. The analysis looks at the…

Natural language generation (NLG) is a process within artificial intelligence where computer systems produce human-comprehensible language texts from information. English as a foreign language (EFL) students' use of NLG tools might facilitate their idea generation, which is fundamental to creative writing. However, little is known about how EFL…

We report four experiments investigating the effect of prosody on listening comprehension in 11-13-year-old children. Across all experiments, participants listened to short object descriptions and answered content-based questions about said objects. In Experiments 1-3, the descriptions were read in an emotionally positive or neutral tone of voice.…

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to…

Current student-centred, multilingual, active teaching methodologies require that teachers have continuous access to texts that are adequate in terms of topic and language competence. However, the task of finding appropriate materials is arduous and time consuming for teachers. To build on automatic readability assessment research that could help…

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) advances technologically, it will inevitably bring many changes to classroom practices. However, research on AI in education reflects a weak connection to pedagogical perspectives or instructional approaches, particularly in K-12 education. AI technologies may benefit motivated and advanced students. Understanding…

With the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI (GenAI) to school settings, teachers are likely to be drawn into professional learning scenarios where they will be expected to learn how to use programs and applications for remediation and tutoring of children. Previous research highlights how professional learning…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

This paper systematically explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) generate explanations of code examples of the type used in intro-to-programming courses. As we show, the nature of code explanations generated by LLMs varies considerably based on the wording of the prompt, the target code examples being explained, the programming language, the…

This study explores using transfer learning in machine learning for natural language processing (NLP) to create generic automated essay scoring (AES) models, providing instant online scoring for statewide writing assessments in K-12 education. The goal is to develop an instant online scorer that is generalizable to any prompt, addressing the…

Educators and researchers are interested in ways that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools might move beyond the role of "cheatbot" and become part of the network of resources students use for writing. We studied how high school students used ChatGPT as a writing support while writing arguments about topics like school mascots. We…