Automated scoring of student language is a complex task that requires systems to emulate complex and multi-faceted human evaluation criteria. Summary scoring brings an additional layer of complexity to automated scoring because it involves two texts of differing lengths that must be compared. In this study, we present our approach to automate…

Having students write reflections has been shown to help teachers improve their instruction and students improve their learning outcomes. With the aid of Natural Language Processing (NLP), real-time educational applications that can assess and provide feedback on reflection quality can be deployed. In this work, we first evaluate various NLP…

In an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), problem (or question) difficulty is one of the most critical parameters, directly impacting problem design, test paper organization, result analysis, and even the fairness guarantee. However, it is very difficult to evaluate the problem difficulty by organized pre-tests or by expertise, because these…

Accounting for complex interactions between contextual variables and learners' individual differences in aptitudes and background requires building the means to connect and access learner data at large scales, across time, and in multiple contexts. This paper describes the ASU Learning@Scale (L@S) project to develop a digital learning network…

Digitalization and automation of test administration, score reporting, and feedback provision have the potential to benefit large-scale and formative assessments. Many studies on automated essay scoring (AES) and feedback generation systems were published in the last decade, but few connected AES and feedback generation within a unified framework.…

Students who take an online course, such as a MOOC, use the course's discussion forum to ask questions or reach out to instructors when encountering an issue. However, reading and responding to students' questions is difficult to scale because of the time needed to consider each message. As a result, critical issues may be left unresolved, and…

As students learn how to program, both their programming code and their understanding of it evolves over time. In this work, we present a general data-driven approach, named "Temporal-ASTNN" for modeling student learning progression in open-ended programming domains. Temporal-ASTNN combines a novel neural network model based on abstract…

Problem-solving is one of the 21st-century skills. However, students still have difficulty solving sequences and series word problems. The purpose of this research is to analyze students' errors in solving sequences and series word problems based on problem-solving steps of Polya. The research method is descriptive qualitative. The research…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

We explore the effectiveness of a simple algorithm for adaptively deciding whether to further decompose a step in a line of reasoning during tutorial dialogue. We compare two versions of a tutorial dialogue system, Rimac: one that always decomposes a step to its simplest sub-steps and one that adaptively decides to decompose a step based on a…

The article focuses on defining how background knowledge impacts on second-language acquisition by giving a brief overview of schema theory, the interaction of the basic modes of information processing. A challenge of dealing with culturally specific texts in second language acquisition is also touched upon. Different research-supported views on…

We developed a story creation platform that allows for collaborative content creation in a 3D environment by utilizing avatars, animations, objects, and backgrounds. Our story envisioning platform provides a shared virtual space that promotes collaborative interaction for story construction, involving a high degree of learner input and control. It…

A discussion of the connectionist approach to language looks at the nature of language, language processing, and language acquisition. Language processing is seen as a means of satisfying the linguistic constraints of comprehension and production, and is also viewed as a process that operates with other aspects of cognition and involves mutually…

A discussion of the ways that consciousness may be involved in learning the principles of second-language discourse and pragmatics draws on current theories of the role of consciousness in human learning in general, with suggestions for extension to the learning of pragmatics. First, research on the degree of consciousness in pragmatic learning…

The purpose of this analytical essay is to lay out some conceptual boundaries and distinctions about how children develop and use metacommunication (messages whose primary function is to make reference to or transform themselves or other messages). Two types of metacommunication are discussed: metalinguistic messages, in which there is a temporary…