Research students in social science disciplines frequently struggle to master statistical analysis. A contributing factor may be the statistical software that is used, as the design of such software may not address the needs of non-statisticians or non-computer programming students. Hence, decisions about which statistical software tools are most…

Systematic reviews are vital for guiding practice, research and policy, although they are often slow and labour-intensive. Large language models (LLMs) could speed up and automate systematic reviews, but their performance in such tasks has yet to be comprehensively evaluated against humans, and no study has tested Generative Pre-Trained…

Web recommendation systems are ubiquitous in the world used to overcome the product overload on e-commerce websites. Among various filtering algorithms, Collaborative Filtering and Content Based Filtering are the best recommendation approaches. Being popular, these filtering approaches still suffer from various limitations such as Cold Start…

Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to revolutionize the analysis of educational data, significantly impacting learning analytics (LA). This study explores the capability of non-experts, including administrators, instructors, and students, to effectively use GenAI for descriptive LA tasks without requiring specialized knowledge in data…

The main goal of this study was to evaluate the impact of an animation and visualization of data structures (AVDS) tool on both perceptions and objective test performance. The study involved a rigorous experiment that assessed the usability, acceptability, and effectiveness of the AVDS tool in solving exercises. A total of 78 participants…

We review the GIDNA and CDM packages in R for fitting cognitive diagnosis/diagnostic classification models. We first provide a summary of their core capabilities and then use both simulated and real data to compare their functionalities in practice. We found that the most relevant routines in the two packages appear to be more similar than…

In the domain of programming, a growing number of algorithms automatically generate data-driven, next-step hints that suggest how students should edit their code to resolve errors and make progress. While these hints have the potential to improve learning if done well, few evaluations have directly assessed or compared the quality of different…

With the increased emphasis on the benefits of self-regulated learning (SRL), it is important to make use of the huge amounts of educational data generated from online learning environments to identify the appropriate educational data mining (EDM) techniques that can help explore and understand online learners' behavioral patterns. Understanding…

Background and Context: Assessing team members' indivdiual contributions to software development projects poses a key problem for computing instructors. While instructors typically rely on subjective assessments, objective assessments could provide a more robust picture. To explore this possibility, In a 2020 paper, Buffardi presented a…

Recent work on measuring growth with categorical outcome variables has combined the item response theory (IRT) measurement model with the latent growth curve model and extended the assessment of growth to multidimensional IRT models and higher order IRT models. However, there is a lack of synthetic studies that clearly evaluate the strength and…

Although badges are among the most-used game elements in gamified education, studies about their optimal features to motivate learning are scarce. How should a badge be designed to represent an incentive for a specific goal like optimal exam preparation? This study examines usage data of a higher education learning app to determine whether the…

Increasing productivity in educational systems is of great importance. Researchers are keen to predict the academic performance of students; this is done to enhance the overall productivity of educational system by effectively identifying students whose performance is below average. This universal concern has been combined with data science…

This article presents an evaluation of edCrumble, a blended learning authoring tool for teachers. The tool visually represents learning designs and integrates data analytics to scaffold teacher design decisions. In addition to assessing the usability of edCrumble using Usability Metric for User Experience questionnaire, analyses of participant…

R and Python are commonly used software languages for data analytics. Using these languages as the course software for the introductory course gives students practical skills for applying statistical concepts to data analysis. However, the reliance upon the command line is perceived by the typical nontechnical introductory student as sufficiently…

Classifying educational forum posts is a longstanding task in the research of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Though this task has been tackled by applying both traditional Machine Learning (ML) approaches (e.g., Logistics Regression and Random Forest) and up-to-date Deep Learning (DL) approaches, there lacks a systematic…