Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

Purpose: Multiple-measure principal evaluation systems have become commonplace in the last decade, but we do not know how principals perceive their evaluations under these regimes. This study analyzes how principals perceive evaluation in a state that was an early adopter of such a system. It describes how attitudes are explained by individual and…

Creativity is highly valued in both education and the workforce, but assessing and developing creativity can be difficult without psychometrically robust and affordable tools. The open-ended nature of creativity assessments has made them difficult to score, expensive, often imprecise, and therefore impractical for school- or district-wide use. To…

Synthesis writing is widely taught across domains and serves as an important means of assessing writing ability, text comprehension, and content learning. Synthesis writing differs from other types of writing in terms of both cognitive and task demands because it requires writers to integrate information across source materials. However, little is…

This paper explores the concept of dynamically generating definitions using a deep-learning model. We do this by creating a dataset that contains definition entries and contexts associated with each definition. We then fine-tune a GPT-2 based model on the dataset to allow the model to generate contextual definitions. We evaluate our model with…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be used to score oral reading fuency (ORF) assessments to ameliorate current inadequacies (e.g., administration errors, high opportunity cost), and represents an important part of a larger solution to improve traditional ORF. But more research is needed on how ASR performs for diverse student groups. The…

The purpose of this study was to explore the paths by which word-problem intervention, with versus without embedded pre-algebraic reasoning instruction, improves word-problem performance. Students with mathematics difficulty (MD; n = 304) were randomly assigned to a business-as-usual condition or one of two variants of word-problem intervention.…

The goal of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and impact of brief school-nurse-administered interventions for reducing anxiety. Thirty school nurses in Connecticut and Maryland were randomly assigned to deliver the Child Anxiety Learning Modules (CALM; n= 14) or CALM--Relaxation only (CALM-R; n= 16). Students (N= 54) were ages 5-12 (M age…

The current study examined the degree to which the quality and characteristics of students' essays could be modeled through dynamic natural language processing analyses. Undergraduate students (n = 131) wrote timed, persuasive essays in response to an argumentative writing prompt. Recurrent patterns of the words in the essays were then analyzed…

The foster youth education program strives to increase graduation rates by improving academic performance and encouraging student retention through an innovative collaboration between tutors, social workers, and schools to provide individualized support. The pilot program was funded by U.S. Department of Education Innovation Funds, which evolving…

Automated essay scoring tools are often criticized on the basis of construct validity. Specifically, it has been argued that computational scoring algorithms may be unaligned to higher-level indicators of quality writing, such as writers' demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the essay topics. In this paper, we consider how and whether the…

This study investigates the potential for linguistic microfeatures related to length, complexity, cohesion, relevance, topic, and rhetorical style to predict L2 writing proficiency. Computational indices were calculated by two automated text analysis tools (Coh- Metrix and the Writing Assessment Tool) and used to predict human essay ratings in a…