Successful comprehension is only possible when children draw inferences about ideas implicit or missing in discourse. Supporting inference-making with explicit instruction must start early given its importance in comprehension and knowledge development. However, students who experience difficulties with early reading skills often do not receive…

Modeling reading comprehension processes is a critical task for Learning Analytics, as accurate models of the reading process can be used to match students to texts, identify appropriate interventions, and predict learning outcomes. This paper introduces an improved version of the Automated Model of Comprehension, namely version 4.0. AMoC has its…

We conducted two experiments to assess the alignment between Generative AI (GenAI) text personalization and hypothetical readers' profiles. In Experiment 1, four LLMs (i.e., Claude 3.5 Sonnet; Llama; Gemini Pro 1.5; ChatGPT 4) were prompted to tailor 10 science texts (i.e., biology, chemistry, physics) to accommodate four different profiles…

Text comprehension is an essential skill in today's information-rich world, and self-explanation practice helps students improve their understanding of complex texts. This study was centered on leveraging open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically FLAN-T5, to automatically assess the comprehension strategies employed by readers while…

Text summarization is an effective reading comprehension strategy. However, summary evaluation is complex and must account for various factors including the summary and the reference text. This study examines a corpus of approximately 3,000 summaries based on 87 reference texts, with each summary being manually scored on a 4-point Likert scale.…

Learning from text is a "constructive" activity in which sentence-level information is combined by the reader to build coherent mental models. With increasingly complex texts, forming a mental model becomes challenging due to a lack of background knowledge, and limits in working memory and attention. To address this, we are taught…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

Large language models (LLMs) offer an opportunity to make large-scale changes to educational content that would otherwise be too costly to implement. The work here highlights how LLMs (in particular GPT-4) can be prompted to revise educational math content ready for large scale deployment in real-world learning environments. We tested the ability…

Learning to paraphrase supports both writing ability and reading comprehension, particularly for less skilled learners. As such, educational tools that integrate automated evaluations of paraphrases can be used to provide timely feedback to enhance learner paraphrasing skills more efficiently and effectively. Paraphrase identification is a popular…

One out of six adults in the United States possesses low literacy skills. Many advocates believe that technology can pave the way for these adults to gain the skills that they desire. This article describes an adaptive intelligent tutoring system called AutoTutor that is designed to teach adults comprehension strategies across different levels of…

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a measure of word complexity which refers to the age at which a word is typically learned. AoA measures have shown strong correlations with reading comprehension, lexical decision times, and writing quality. AoA scores based on both adult and child data have limitations that allow for error in measurement, and increase…

Reading comprehension is often assessed by having students read passages and administering a test that assesses their understanding of the text. Shorter assessments may fail to give a full picture of comprehension ability while more thorough ones can be time consuming and costly. This study used data from a conversational intelligent tutoring…

Main idea and summary are essential elements of reading comprehension. We report results from Grades 4 and 5 student performance on two years of state-mandated standardized reading testing which indicate that students perform statistically significantly lower on main idea and summary questions on the tests than any other question category. In this…

We present an integrated theoretical framework guiding the use of visual narratives in educational settings. We focus specifically on the use of static and dynamic visual narratives to teach and assess inference skills in young children and discuss evidence to support the efficacy of this approach. In doing so, first we review the basis of the…

Automated essay scoring tools are often criticized on the basis of construct validity. Specifically, it has been argued that computational scoring algorithms may be unaligned to higher-level indicators of quality writing, such as writers' demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the essay topics. In this paper, we consider how and whether the…