An important, yet largely unstudied problem in student data analysis is to detect "misconceptions" from students' responses to "open-response" questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the misconceptions exhibited by many students in their class, thus improving the quality of…

A pedagogic conversational agent (PCA) can be defined as a computer system that interacts with the student in natural language assuming the role of the instructor, a student or a companion. It can have a personality and can generate different sentences according to the agent or the student mood. Empathy with the students' feelings seems to…

This paper discusses several design issues in the development of a new online Japanese textbook, called "Robo-Sensei: Japanese Curriculum with Automated Feedback". When it is completed, the new online textbook will present a full Japanese curriculum. It extends a previously published online software program, "Robo-Sensei: Personal Japanese Tutor"…

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…