Tutoring technologies for supporting learning from errors via negative feedback are highly developed and have proven their worth in empirical evaluations. However, observations of empirical tutoring dialogs highlight the importance of positive feedback in the practice of expert tutoring. We hypothesize that positive feedback works by reducing…

The Common Core Mathematics Standards have raised expectations for schools and students in the United States. These standards demand much deeper content knowledge from teachers of mathematics and their students. Given the increasingly diverse student population in today's classrooms and shortage of qualified special education teachers,…

Nowadays, intelligent tutoring systems are considered an effective research tool for learning systems and problem-solving skill improvement. Nonetheless, such individualized systems may cause students to lose learning motivation when interaction and timely guidance are lacking. In order to address this problem, a solution-based intelligent…

Recent research has shown that educational games positively motivate learning. However, there is a little evidence that they can trigger learning to a large extent if the game-play is supported by additional activities. We aim to support educational games development with an Agent-Based Technology (ABT) by using intelligent pedagogical agents that…

Erroneous examples--step-by-step problem solutions with one or more errors for students to find and fix--hold great potential to help students learn. In this study, which is a replication of a prior study (Adams et al. 2014), but with a much larger population (390 vs. 208), middle school students learned about decimals either by working with…

Intelligent tutoring and personalization are considered as the two most important factors in the research of learning systems and environments. An effective tool that can be used to improve problem-solving ability is an Intelligent Tutoring System which is capable of mimicking a human tutor's actions in implementing a one-to-one personalized and…

One of the most popular student modeling approaches is Constraint-Based Modeling (CBM). It is an efficient approach that can be easily applied inside an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Even with these characteristics, building new ITSs requires carefully designing the domain model to be taught because different sources of errors could affect…

Prior research shows that representational competencies that enable students to use graphical representations to reason and solve tasks is key to learning in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains. We focus on two types of representational competencies: (1) "sense making" of connections by verbally explaining how…

A number of studies have demonstrated links between linguistic knowledge and performance in math. Studies examining these links in first language speakers of English have traditionally relied on correlational analyses between linguistic knowledge tests and standardized math tests. For second language (L2) speakers, the majority of studies have…

Prior research shows that representational competencies that enable students to use graphical representations to reason and solve tasks is key to learning in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains. We focus on two types of representational competencies: (1) "sense making" of connections by verbally…

Collaborative learning has been shown to be beneficial for older students, but there has not been much research to show if these results transfer to elementary school students. In addition, collaborative and individual modes of instruction may be better for acquiring different types of knowledge. Collaborative Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS)…

In most Intelligent Tutoring Systems, the help messages (hints) are not very clear for students as they are only presented textually and have little connection with the task elements. This can lead to students' undesired behaviors, like gaming the system, associated with low performance. In this paper, the authors aim at evaluating if the gestures…

Clinical reasoning is a central skill in diagnosing cases. However, diagnosing a clinical case poses several challenges that are inherent to solving multifaceted ill-structured problems. In particular, when solving such problems, the complexity stems from the existence of multiple paths to arriving at the correct solution (Lajoie, 2003). Moreover,…

This paper presents an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for the learning of arithmetical problem solving. This is based on an analysis of (a) the cognitive processes that take place during problem solving; and (b) the usual tasks performed by a human when supervising a student in a one-to-one tutoring situation. The ITS is able to identify the…

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…