ChatGPT and Bard, two chatbots powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are propelling the educational sector towards a new era of instructional innovation. Within this educational paradigm, the present investigation conducts a comparative analysis of these groundbreaking chatbots, scrutinizing their distinct operational characteristics and…

As language technologies have become more sophisticated and prevalent, there have been increasing concerns about bias in natural language processing (NLP). Such work often focuses on the effects of bias instead of sources. In contrast, this paper discusses how normative language assumptions and ideologies influence a range of automated language…

Human essay grading is a laborious task that can consume much time and effort. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has thus been proposed as a fast and effective solution to the problem of grading student writing at scale. However, because AES typically uses supervised machine learning, a human-graded essay corpus is still required to train the AES…

Dialogism is a philosophical theory centered on the idea that life involves a dialogue among multiple voices in a continuous exchange and interaction. Considering human language, different ideas or points of view take the form of voices, which spread throughout any discourse and influence it. From a computational point of view, voices can be…

This paper provides a possible strategy for integrating large language artificial intelligence models (LLMs) in supporting students' education in artistic or design activities. We outline the methodological foundations concerning the integration of CHATGPT LLM in the educational approach aimed at enhancing artistic conception and design ideation.…

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…

Caregivers (i.e., parents and members of a child's caring community) are underappreciated stakeholders in learning analytics. Although caregiver involvement can enhance student academic outcomes, many obstacles hinder involvement, most notably knowledge gaps with respect to modern school curricula. An emerging topic of interest in learning…

Learning objectives, especially those well defined by applying Bloom's taxonomy for Cognitive Objectives, have been widely recognized as important in various teaching and learning practices. However, many educators have difficulties developing learning objectives appropriate to the levels in Bloom's taxonomy, as they need to consider the…

Typical data science instruction uses generic datasets like survival rates on the Titanic, which may not be motivating for students. Will introducing real-life data science problems fill this motivational deficit? To analyze this question, we contrasted learning with generic datasets and artificial problems (Phase 1) with a community-sourced…

Detailed learning objectives foster an effective and equitable learning environment by clarifying what instructors expect students to learn, rather than requiring students to use prior knowledge to infer these expectations. When questions are labeled with relevant learning goals, students understand which skills are tested by those questions.…

Worked examples, which present an explained code for solving typical programming problems are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide…

Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e., training classifiers or fine-tuning language models on a small number of responses with human-provided score…

Large language models have recently been able to perform well in a wide variety of circumstances. In this work, we explore the possibility of large language models, specifically GPT-3, to write explanations for middle-school mathematics problems, with the goal of eventually using this process to rapidly generate explanations for the mathematics…

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex, hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating feedback for students. We investigate using LLMs to generate feedback for fixing syntax errors in Python programs, a key scenario in introductory programming. More concretely, given a student's buggy program, our goal is…

In Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems, many previous works have studied group fairness using the demographic features of essay writers. However, individual fairness also plays an important role in fair evaluation and has not been yet explored. Initialized by Dwork et al., the fundamental concept of individual fairness is "similar people…