Motivation to read is crucial to improving reading skill. While there is extensive research examining reading motivation among elementary students, with respect to adolescents, research is limited. Employing a person-centered approach can aid in developing a better understanding of adolescent reading motivation and would help address possible…

Learning experience designers consistently balance the trade-off between open and close-ended activities. The growth and scalability of Computer Based Learning Platforms (CBLPs) have only magnified the importance of these design trade-offs. CBLPs often utilize close-ended activities (i.e. Multiple-Choice Questions [MCQs]) due to feasibility…

Assessing students' answers and in particular natural language answers is a crucial challenge in the field of education. Advances in transformer-based models such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have led to significant progress in various natural language tasks. Nevertheless, amidst the growing trend of evaluating LLMs across diverse tasks,…

Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

The goal in personalized assessment is to best fit the needs of each individual test taker, given the assessment purposes. Design-In-Real-Time (DIRTy) assessment reflects the progressive evolution in testing from a single test, to an adaptive test, to an adaptive assessment "system." In this paper, we lay the foundation for DIRTy…

Cyberlearning technologies increasingly seek to offer personalized learning experiences via adaptive systems that customize pedagogy, content, feedback, pace, and tone according to the just-in-time needs of a learner. However, it is historically difficult to: (1) create these smart learning environments; (2) continuously improve them based on…

We investigate two research questions using a recent statewide transition from paper to computer-based testing: first, the extent to which test mode effects found in prior studies can be eliminated in large-scale administration; and second, the degree to which online and paper assessments offer different information about underlying student…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing applied in education. Solutions vary from handcrafted linguistic features to large Transformer-based models, implying a significant effort in feature extraction and model implementation. We introduce a novel Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) pipeline…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based assessments are commonly used in a variety of settings including business, healthcare, policing, manufacturing, and education. In education, AI-based assessments undergird intelligent tutoring systems as well as many tools used to evaluate students and, in turn, guide learning and instruction. This chapter…

The purpose of this study was to understand the impact, implementation and costs associated with a one-semester elective lab course in 9th grade, Accelerating Literacy for Adolescents (ALFA) Lab, which seeks to improve students' reading achievement, particularly for those from economically disadvantaged communities. This study used three cohorts…

The effectiveness of feedback in enhancing learning outcomes is well documented within Educational Data Mining (EDM). Various prior research have explored methodologies to enhance the effectiveness of feedback to students in various ways. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their utility in enhancing automated…

This is an editorial for a special issue "Innovations in Exploring Sequential Process Data" in the journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie. Process data refer to log files generated by human-computer interactive items. They document the entire process, including keystrokes, mouse clicks as well as the associated time stamps, performed by a…

In this article, the beta-binomial model for count data is proposed and demonstrated in terms of its application in the context of oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment, where the number of words read correctly (WRC) is of interest. Existing studies adopted the binomial model for count data in similar assessment scenarios. The beta-binomial model,…

The field of educational measurement places validity and fairness as central concepts of assessment quality (AERA, APA, NCME, 2014). Prior research has proposed embedding fairness arguments within argument-based validity processes, particularly when fairness is conceived as comparability in assessment properties across groups (Chapelle, 2021; Xi,…

As access to higher education increases, it is important to monitor students with special needs to facilitate the provision of appropriate resources and support. Although metrics such as ACT's (formerly American College Testing) "reading readiness" provide insight into how many students may need such resources, they do not specify…