This dissertation presents various machine learning applications for predicting different cognitive states of students while they are using a vocabulary tutoring system, DSCoVAR. We conduct four studies, each of which includes a comprehensive analysis of behavioral and linguistic data and provides data-driven evidence for designing personalized…

The future of education is human expertise and artificial intelligence working in conjunction, a revolution that will change the education as we know it. The Intelligent Tutoring System is a key component of this future. A quantitative measurement of efficacies of practice to heterogeneous learners is the cornerstone of building an effective…

The increasing amount of available subjective text data in internet such as product reviews, movie critiques and social media comments provides golden opportunities for information retrieval researchers to extract useful information out of such datasets. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis are two widely researched fields that separately try to…

This dissertation presents a novel effort to develop ITS technologies that adapt by observing student behavior. In particular, we define an evolving expert knowledge base (EEKB) that structures a domain's information as a set of nodes and the relationships that exist between those nodes. The structure of this model is not the particularly novel…

This dissertation describes a research study designed to explore whether customization of online instruction results in improved learning in a college business statistics course. The study involved utilizing computer spreadsheet technology to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) designed to: a) collect and monitor individual real-time…

While many studies have demonstrated that conversational tutoring systems have a positive effect on learning, the amount of manual effort required to author, design, and tune dialogue behaviors remains a major barrier to widespread deployment and adoption of these systems. Such dialogue systems must not only understand student speech, but must…

This study empirically evaluated the effectiveness of the instructional design, learning tools, and role of the teacher in three versions of a semester-long, high-school remedial Algebra I course to determine what impact self-regulated learning skills and learning pattern training have on students' self-regulation, math achievement, and…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) that adapt to an individual student's needs have shown significant improvement in achievement over non-adaptive instruction (Murray 1999). This improvement occurs due to the individualized instruction and feedback that an ITS provides. In order to achieve the benefits that ITSs provide, we must find a way to…

Many people in general think that digital game environment has potential as a learning environment. However, empirical research in digital game environment and education is a still relative young field, so to create a digital learning environment where students are actively engaged in the learning process is a great challenge. In part, it has been…