As Computer Science has increased in popularity so too have class sizes and demands on faculty to provide support. It is therefore more important than ever for us to identify new ways to triage student questions, identify common problems, target students who need the most help, and better manage instructors' time. By analyzing interaction data…

The current study explores the ability to predict argumentative claims in structurally-annotated student essays to gain insights into the role of argumentation structure in the quality of persuasive writing. Our annotation scheme specified six types of argumentative components based on the well-established Toulmin's model of argumentation. We…

Finding the optimal topic sequence of online courses requires experts with lots of knowledge about taught topics. Having a good order is necessary for a good learning experience. By using educational recommender systems across different platforms we have the problem that the connection to an ontology sometimes does not exist. Thus, the state of…

Peer assessment has been widely applied across diverse academic fields over the last few decades, and has demonstrated its effectiveness. However, the advantages of peer assessment can only be achieved with high-quality peer reviews. Previous studies have found that high-quality review comments usually comprise several features (e.g., contain…

In some computerized educational systems, there is evidence of students "wheel-spinning," where a student tries and repeatedly fails at an educational task for learning a skill. This may be particularly concerning in low resource settings. Prior research has focused on predicting and modeling wheel-spinning, but there has been little…

We investigated the feasibility of using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) to classify collaborative problem solving (CPS) skills from recorded speech in noisy environments. We analyzed data from 44 dyads of middle and high school students who used videoconferencing to collaboratively solve physics and math…

Teaching in formal academic environments typically follows a curriculum that specifies learning objectives that need to be met at each phase of a student's academic progression. In this paper, we address the novel task of identifying document "segments" in educational material that are relevant for different learning objectives. Using a…

Overall the social capital of MOOCs is under-exploited. For most students in MOOCs, autonomous learning often means learning alone. Students interested in adding a social dimension to their learning can browse discussion threads, join social medias and may message other students but usually in a blind and somehow random way, only hoping to find…

During the semester break, 36 second-grade students accessed a set of resources and completed a series of online math activities focused on the application of the model method for arithmetic in two contexts 1) addition/subtraction and 2) multiplication/division. The learning environment first modeled and then supported the use of a scripted series…