Encouraging teachers to reflect on their instructional practices and course design has been shown to be an effective means of improving instruction and student learning. However, the process of encouraging reflection is difficult; reflection requires quality data, thoughtful analysis, and contextualized interpretation. Because of this, research on…

Multiple choice questions are traditionally expensive to produce. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to fine-tuned LLMs that generate questions competitive with human-authored questions. However, the relative capabilities of ChatGPT-family models have not yet been established for this task. We present a carefully-controlled…

Digital sandbox games such as "Minecraft" can be used to assess and support creativity. Doing so, however, requires an understanding of what is deemed creative in this game context. One approach is to understand how Minecrafters describe creativity in their communities, and how much those descriptions overlap with the established…

Comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming lexical items in language processing using various types of contextual information. However, a number of studies have shown that argument roles do not impact neural and behavioral prediction measures. Despite these robust findings, some prior studies have suggested that lexical prediction might be…

The limitations of traditional education models and the advancement of technology have revealed the need to transform the learning experience. The "Flipped Learning" approach, born out of this need, is a model where students study learning materials in advance and participate in more interactive and hands-on activities in the classroom.…

This paper presents a multidimensional model of variation in writing quality, register, and genre in student essays, trained and tested via confirmatory factor analysis of 1.37 million essay submissions to ETS' digital writing service, Criterion®. The model was also validated with several other corpora, which indicated that it provides a…

Surveys have long been used in physics education research to understand student reasoning and inform course improvements. However, to make analysis of large sets of responses practical, most surveys use a closed-response format with a small set of potential responses. Open-ended formats, such as written free response, can provide deeper insights…

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

Text comprehension is an essential skill in today's information-rich world, and self-explanation practice helps students improve their understanding of complex texts. This study was centered on leveraging open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically FLAN-T5, to automatically assess the comprehension strategies employed by readers while…

Large language models such as ChatGPT can be seen as a major threat to reliable assessment in higher education. In this point of departure, I argue that these tools are a major game changer for society at large. Many of the jobs we now consider highly skilled are based on pattern recognition that can much more reliably be carried by fine-tuned…

The Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) conference focuses on discussing and addressing the challenges pertaining to the evolution of the learning process, the role of pedagogical approaches and the progress of technological innovation, in the context of the digital age. In each edition, CELDA, gathers researchers and…

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require…

This study fit a Naïve Bayesian classifier to the words of exam items to predict the Bloom's taxonomy level of the items. We addressed five research questions, showing that reasonably good prediction of Bloom's level was possible, but accuracy varies across levels. In our study, performance for Level 2 was poor (Level 2 items were misclassified…

Advances in machine learning (ML) are poised to contribute to our understanding of the linguistic processes associated with successful reading comprehension, which is a critical aspect of children's educational success. We used ML techniques to investigate and compare associations between children's reading comprehension and 260 linguistic…

Game-based learning environments hold significant promise for facilitating learning experiences that are both effective and engaging. To support individualised learning and support proactive scaffolding when students are struggling, game-based learning environments should be able to accurately predict student knowledge at early points in students'…