In tutoring systems, a pedagogical policy, which decides the next action for the tutor to take, is important because it determines how well students will learn. An effective pedagogical policy must adapt its actions according to the student's features, such as knowledge, error patterns, and emotions. For adapting difficulty, it is common to…

In Chinese, writing is a basic competency that pupils should possess. But it is still challenging for teachers to improve pupils' writing abilities. Therefore, this study proposes an intelligence-based cognitive diagnostic feedback strategy to improve pupils' writing ability and writing learning quality by analyzing their writing performance,…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) teach skills using learning-by-doing principles and provide learners with individualized feedback and materials adapted to their level of understanding. Given a learner's history of past interactions with an ITS, a learner performance model estimates the current state of a learner's knowledge and predicts her…

Literature can sometimes tend to present context and culture almost as synonyms. This creates ambiguity, which can complicate the consideration of contextual and cultural variables in instructional design, learning, and teaching. From an ontological point of view, some clarification of these two concepts is essential as each may influence learning…

In Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), methods to choose the next exercise for a student are inspired from generic recommender systems, used, for instance, in online shopping or multimedia recommendation. As such, collaborative filtering, especially matrix factorization, is often included as a part of recommendation algorithms in ITS. One notable…

The overarching goal of our project is to design effective learning activities for PyKinetic, a smartphone Python tutor. In this paper, we present a study using a variant of Parsons problems we designed for PyKinetic. Parsons problems contain randomized code which needs to be re-ordered to produce the desired effect. In our variant of Parsons…

Similar content has tremendous utility in classroom and online learning environments. For example, similar content can be used to combat cheating, track students' learning over time, and model students' latent knowledge. These different use cases for similar content all rely on different notions of similarity, which make it difficult to determine…

Many studies have shown that visual representations can enhance student understanding of STEM concepts. However, prior research suggests that visual representations alone are not necessarily effective across a broad range of students. To address this problem, we created a novel, scaffolded form of diagrammatic self-explanation in which students…

Prior research has shown that, under certain conditions, Human-Agent (H-A) alignment exists to a stronger degree than that found in Human-Human (H-H) communication. In an H-H Second Language (L2) setting, evidence of alignment has been linked to learning and teaching strategy. We present a novel analysis of H-A and H-H L2 learner dialogues using…

Context personalization--the incorporation of students' out-of-school interests into learning tasks--has recently been shown to positively affect students' situational interest and their performance and learning in mathematics. However, few studies have shown effects on both interest and achievement, drawing into question whether context…

The ability to self-regulate learning (SRL) is a skill theorized to transfer across learning environments. Students with this ability can consider a learning task, identify a goal, develop a plan to achieve it, execute that plan, and monitor and adapt learning until the goal is met. This paper examines the educational implications of developing…

Over the last couple of decades, there have been a large variety of approaches towards modeling student knowledge within intelligent tutoring systems. With the booming development of deep learning and large-scale artificial neural networks, there have been empirical successes in a number of machine learning and data mining applications, including…

The phenomenon of wheel spinning refers to students attempting to solve problems on a particular skill, but becoming stuck due to an inability to learn the skill. Past research has found that students who do not master a skill quickly tend not to master it at all. One question is why do students wheel spin? A plausible hypothesis is that students…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are beneficial for individual students learning in several domains, including mathematics where they have been used to support both secondary and elementary students. Collaborative learning may be beneficial to include in ITSs, particularly for conceptual knowledge. There is little work on collaborative ITSs,…

Research in Educational Data Mining could benefit from greater efforts to ensure that models yield reliable, valid, and interpretable parameter estimates. These efforts have especially been lacking for individualized student-parameter models. We collected two datasets from a sizable student population with excellent "depth" -- that is,…