When the purpose and meaning of grades is not well-defined by an organization, there is a disconnect between curricular/assessment practices and student engagement. This study sought to investigate origins and find solutions in regards to discerning a student's knowledge and mastery of a subject and how this is reflected in the grade, and how…

Assessment is a key component of education. Routine grading of students' work, however, is time consuming. Automating the grading process allows instructors to spend more of their time helping their students learn and engaging their students with more open-ended, creative activities. One way to automate grading is through computer-based…

Jung and Won's (2018) review of elementary school ER found a lack of understanding of instructional practices for ER with young children. Other researchers have called for further studies into what effective classroom orchestration and interaction look like within ER classrooms (Ioannou & Makridou, 2018; Xia & Zhong, 2019). This study was…

Clustering, a prevalent class of machine learning (ML) algorithms used in data mining and pattern-finding--has increasingly helped engineering education researchers and educators see and understand assessment patterns at scale. However, a challenge remains to make ML-enabled educational inferences that are useful and reliable for research or…

Adaptive tutoring systems often model student knowledge in ways that break away from a "one size fits all" approach to learning. Nonetheless, the strengths of these systems can often be limited, as knowledge representations are not easily interpreted by teachers, which make these systems difficult to integrate into pedagogical practices.…

This dissertation presents various machine learning applications for predicting different cognitive states of students while they are using a vocabulary tutoring system, DSCoVAR. We conduct four studies, each of which includes a comprehensive analysis of behavioral and linguistic data and provides data-driven evidence for designing personalized…