Supporting students to revise their written explanations in science can help students to integrate disparate ideas and develop a coherent, generative account of complex scientific topics. Using natural language processing to analyze student written work, we compare forms of automated guidance designed to motivate productive revision and help…

This study compares two designs of automated guidance for short essays in an online thermodynamics unit. Students are prompted by automated guidance to either "revisit" evidence in a dynamic model prior or to plan "writing" changes prior to revision. In this paper we specifically examine how receiving either type of guidance…

Computer scoring of student written essays about an inquiry topic can be used to diagnose student progress both to alert teachers to struggling students and to generate automated guidance. We identify promising ways for teachers to add value to automated guidance to improve student learning. Three teachers from two schools and their 386 students…

While automated guidance in online units has been found to successfully support learning, students can sometimes feel alienated rather than motivated due to computerized guidance seeming impersonal. In this study, we explore ways to improve learning and motivation by personalizing adaptive guidance. Standard adaptive guidance is compared to more…

In 4 classroom experiments we investigated uses for technologies that automatically score student generated essays, concept diagrams, and drawings in inquiry curricula. We used the automatic scores to assign typical and research-based guidance and studied the impact of the guidance on student progress. Seven teachers and their 897 students…