Blended learning (BL) has become increasingly popular in higher education institutions. Despite its popularity and the advances in methodologies for the detection of learning tactics and strategies from trace data, little is known about how they apply to BL settings and, therefore, how students use them to plan, organize, monitor, and regulate…

Is there a pattern in how students solve Parsons puzzles? Is there a difference between the puzzle-solving strategies of C++ and Java students? We used Markov transition matrix to answer these questions. We analyzed the solutions of introductory programming students solving Parsons puzzles involving if-else statements and while loops in C++ and…

Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student…

Timely diagnostic feedback is helpful for students and teachers, enabling them to adjust their learning and teaching plans according to a current diagnosis. Motivated by the practical concern that the simultaneity estimation strategy currently adopted by longitudinal learning diagnosis models does not provide timely diagnostic feedback, this study…

The adaptive learning problem concerns how to create an individualized learning plan (also referred to as a learning policy) that chooses the most appropriate learning materials based on a learner's latent traits. In this article, we study an important yet less-addressed adaptive learning problem--one that assumes continuous latent traits.…

We use Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis to construct a three-question math quiz to assess key skills needed for introductory finance. We begin with data collected from a ten-question criterion-referenced math quiz given to 314 undergraduates on the first day of class. MCMC indicates the top three questions for predicting overall course…

With the onset of online education via technology-enhanced learning platforms, large amount of educational data is being generated in the form of logs, clickstreams, performance, etc. These Virtual Learning Environments provide an opportunity to the researchers for the application of educational data mining and learning analytics, for mining the…

Correct pronunciation significantly increases the intelligibility of communication. However, it is uncertain whether acquiring the pronunciation of the words enhances word retention capability. Therefore, the major purpose of this research is to evaluate whether vocabulary acquisition with the aid of pronouncing with artificial intelligence leads…

One of the most challenging issues for online courseware engineering is to maintain the quality of instructional components, such as written text, video, and assessments. Learning engineers would like to know how individual instructional components contributed to students' learning. However, it is a hard task because it requires significant…

We propose a method of generating teaching policies for use in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) for concept learning tasks [1], e.g., teaching students the meanings of words by showing images that exemplify their meanings à la Rosetta Stone [2] and Duo Lingo [3]. The approach is grounded in control theory and capitalizes on recent work by [4],…

Analyzing students' growth remains an important topic in educational research. Most recently, Diagnostic Classification Models (DCMs) have been used to track skill acquisition in a longitudinal fashion, with the purpose to provide an estimate of students' learning trajectories in terms of the change of fine-grained skills overtime. Response time…

Online planning of good teaching sequences has the potential to provide a truly personalized teaching experience with a huge impact on the motivation and learning of students. In this work we compare two main approaches to achieve such a goal, POMDPs that can find an optimal long-term path, and Multi-armed bandits that optimize policies locally…

An important goal in the design and development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is to have a system that adaptively reacts to students' behavior in the short term and effectively improves their learning performance in the long term. Inducing effective pedagogical strategies that accomplish this goal is an essential challenge. To address…

The rapid growth of blended and online learning models in higher education has resulted in a parallel increase in the use of audio-visual resources among students and teachers. Despite the heavy adoption of video resources, there have been few studies investigating their effect on learning processes and even less so in the context of academic…

This report summarises the research activities and findings from the TLRI-funded project entitled "Visualising Chance: Learning Probability Through Modelling." This exploratory study was a 2-year collaboration among two researchers, two conceptual software developers/interactive graphics experts, three university lecturers/practitioners,…