As the use of process data in large-scale educational assessments is becoming more common, it is clear that data on examinees' test-taking behaviors can illuminate their performance, and can have crucial ramifications concerning assessments' validity. A thorough review of the literature in the field may inform researchers and practitioners of…

Background: Examinees may not make enough effort when responding to test items if the assessment has no consequence for them. These disengaged responses can be problematic in low-stakes, large-scale assessments because they can bias item parameter estimates. However, the amount of bias, and whether this bias is similar across administrations, is…

More research is needed on how to best use analytics to support educational decisions and design effective learning environments. This study was to explore and mine the data captured by a digital educational game designed for middle school science to understand learners' behavioral patterns in using the game, and to use evidence-based findings to…

In this paper, we focus on optimizing the assignment of students to courses. The target courses are conducted by different teachers using the same syllabus, course design, and lecture materials. More than 1,300 students are mechanically assigned to one of ten courses taught by different teachers. Therefore, mismatches often occur between students'…

Reading comprehension is critical in life-long learning as well as in the workplace. In this paper, we describe how multidimensional k-means clustering combined with Bloom's Taxonomy can be used to determine positive and negative cognitive skill sets with respect to reading comprehension tasks. This information could be used to inform environments…

The authors examined the effects of randomized and delayed credit on the percentage of college students participating at four pre-defined levels on each class discussion day: non-participation, credit-level participation, frequent participation, and dominant participation. Although the same amount of participation credit was available to students…

Improving the effectiveness of learning when students observe video lectures becomes urgent with the rising advent of (web-based) video materials. Vital questions are how students differ in their learning preferences and what patterns in viewing video can be detected in log files. Our experiments inventory students' viewing patterns while watching…

This study investigated the relation between dilatory behaviors and performance in students whom we randomly assigned to either an online or a traditional, lecture introductory psychology class. Both sections had full access to a class Web site. There were no reliable differences between the 2 sections of the class on the measures of…