Providing timely feedback is crucial in promoting academic achievement and student success. However, for multifarious reasons (e.g., limited teaching resources), feedback often arrives too late for learners to act on the feedback and improve learning. Thus, automated feedback systems have emerged to tackle educational tasks in various domains,…

Learning computer programming is a challenging task for most beginners. Demotivation and learned helplessness are pretty common. A novel instructional technique that leverages the value-expectancy motivational model of student learning was conceptualized by the author to counter the lack of motivation in the introductory class. The result was a…

Logic as a knowledge representation and reasoning language is a fundamental topic of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) course and includes a number of sub-topics. One of them, which brings difficulties to students to deal with, is converting natural language (NL) sentences into first-order logic (FOL) formulas. To assist students to overcome those…

Often, second/foreign (L2) language learners receive little opportunity to interact orally in the target language. Interactive, conversation-based spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that use automated speech recognition and natural language processing have the potential to address this need by engaging learners in meaningful, goal-oriented speaking…

As artificially intelligent systems make their foray into the day-to-day educational experiences of students, we need to pay careful attention to the relationship between the system and the student. In this article, the authors discuss designing the personality of a virtual tutoring system called IBM Watson Tutor. The AI personality is key to the…

Influenced by COVID-19, online learning has become one of the most important forms of education in the world. In the era of intelligent education, knowledge tracing (KT) can provide excellent technical support for individualized teaching. For online learning, we come up with a new knowledge tracing method that integrates mathematical exercise…

Background: Pedagogical agents are computerized talking heads or embodied animated avatars that help students learn by performing actions and holding conversations with the students in natural language. Dialogues occur between a tutor agent and the student in the case of AutoTutor and other intelligent tutoring systems with natural language…

Within STEM domains, physics is considered to be one of the most difficult topics to master, in part because many of the underlying principles are counter-intuitive. Effective teaching methods rely on engaging the student in active experimentation and encouraging deep reasoning, often through the use of self-explanation. Supporting such…

The current studies investigated the efficient use of dialogue in intelligent tutoring systems that use natural language interaction. Such dialogues can be relatively time-consuming. This work addresses the question of how much dialogue is needed to produce significant learning gains. In Experiment 1, a full dialogue condition and a read-only…

This paper proposes a generic methodology and architecture for developing a novel conversational intelligent tutoring system (CITS) called Oscar that leads a tutoring conversation and dynamically predicts and adapts to a student's learning style. Oscar aims to mimic a human tutor by implicitly modelling the learning style during tutoring, and…

Pedagogical strategies are policies for a tutor to decide the next action when there are multiple actions available. When the content is controlled to be the same across experimental conditions, there has been little evidence that tutorial decisions have an impact on students' learning. In this paper, we applied Reinforcement Learning (RL) to…

We describe a computer assisted language learning (CALL) system that uses human-machine dialogue as its medium of interaction. The system was developed to help students learn the basics of the Maori language and was designed to accompany the introductory course in Maori running at the University of Otago. The student engages in a task-based…

In this article, Annick Janson and Robin Janson introduce research from the Microsoft New Zealand's Partners in Learning Programme by documenting the impact of digital learning objects (DLOs) on educational practice. Janson and Janson describe the impact of DLOs on the teaching practice of a primary school in New Zealand, tracing the effects of…

For beginning programmers, inadequate problem solving and planning skills are among the most salient of their weaknesses. In this paper, we test the efficacy of natural language tutoring to teach and scaffold acquisition of these skills. We describe ProPL (Pro-PELL), a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system that elicits goal decompositions and…

CIRCSIM-Tutor is a computer tutor designed to carry out a natural language dialogue with a medical student. Its domain is the baroreceptor reflex, the part of the cardiovascular system that is responsible for maintaining a constant blood pressure. CIRCSIM-Tutor's interaction with students is modeled after the tutoring behavior of two experienced…