Interactive simulations allow students to independently explore scientific phenomena and ideally infer the underlying principles through their exploration. Effectively using such environments is challenging for many students and therefore, adaptive guidance has the potential to improve student learning. Providing effective support is, however,…

In this paper, we present the development of an investigation on the promotion of covariational reasoning in high school students (14-15 years old) in Mexico. The study consists of designing and applying a sequence of didactic activities that simulate a real situation virtually. The activities are organized through a Hypothetical Learning…

The complex and dynamic nature of collaboration makes it challenging to find indicators of productive learning and quality collaboration. This exploratory study developed a collaboration metric to capture temporal patterns of joint attention (JA) based on log files generated as students interacted with an immersive astronomy simulation using…

This work is a step towards full automation of auto-mentoring processes in multi-player online environments such as virtual internships. We focus on automatically identifying speaker's intentions, i.e. the speech acts of chat utterances, in such virtual internships. Particularly, we explore several machine learning methods to categorize speech…

Online learning has attracted a large number of participants and is increasingly becoming very popular. However, the completion rates for online learning are notoriously low. Further, unlike traditional education systems, teachers, if any, are unable to comprehensively evaluate the learning gain of each student through the online learning…

Using computer simulation data, the effect of a single global outlier in two-group classification analysis was explored in terms of the outcome variables of change in classification results (PCHNG), change in misclassification rate (MISDIF), and change in precision of misclassification rate estimation. The precision of misclassification rate…

The purpose of this Item Response Theory study was to investigate how the expected reduction in item information, due to the collapsing of response categories in performance assessment data, was affected by varying testing conditions: item difficulty, item discrimination, inter-rater reliability, and direction of collapsing. The investigation used…

Type I error rates of the likelihood ratio test for the detection of differential item functioning (DIF) were investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. The graded response model with five ordered categories was used to generate data sets of a 30-item test for samples of 300 and 1,000 simulated examinees. All DIF comparisons were simulated by…

This study was designed to look for patterns of parental behavior by assessing styles of child rearing in a novel way--through responses on an interactive computer program simulating an average day in the life of a mother and a preschooler. Presented to each subject (39 mothers of preschoolers and a control group of non-mothers) were 30 common…

A part-form methodology was used to study the effect of varying degrees of multidimensionality on the consistency of pass/fail classification decisions obtained from simulated unidimensional item response theory (IRT) based licensure examinations. A control on the degree of form multidimensionality permitted an assessment throughout the range of…

This study examined performance of a simulated computerized adaptive test that was designed to help direct the development of a medical recertification examination. The item pool consisted of 229 single-best-answer items from a random sample of 3,000 examinees, calibrated using the two-parameter logistic model. Examinees' responses were known. For…