An overarching motivation driving my research has been to further our theoretical understanding of how readers successfully comprehend challenging text. This article describes the theoretical origins of this research program and my quest to understand comprehension processes through the use of technology. Coh-Metrix was developed to measure, and…

An overarching motivation driving my research has been to further our theoretical understanding of how readers successfully comprehend challenging text. This article describes the theoretical origins of this research program and my quest to understand comprehension processes through the use of technology. Coh-Metrix was developed to measure, and…

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the entire world, while the impact and usage of online learning environments has greatly increased. This paper presents a new version of the ReaderBench framework, grounded in Cohesion Network Analysis, which can be used to evaluate the online activity of students as a plug-in feature to Moodle. A Recurrent Neural…

This study investigated the effect of incorporating spelling and grammar checking tools within an automated writing tutoring system, Writing Pal. High school students (n = 119) wrote and revised six persuasive essays. After initial drafts, all students received formative feedback about writing strategies. Half of the participants were also given…

Computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) provide unprecedented opportunities for personalized learning at scale. One such system, iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking) is an adaptive, game-based tutoring system for reading comprehension. This paper describes how efforts to increase personalized learning have…

Computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) provide unprecedented opportunities for personalized learning at scale. One such system, iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking) is an adaptive, game-based tutoring system for reading comprehension. This paper describes how efforts to increase personalized learning have…

The assessment of argumentative writing generally includes analyses of the specific linguistic and rhetorical features contained in the individual essays produced by students. However, researchers have recently proposed that an individual's ability to flexibly adapt the linguistic properties of their writing may more accurately capture their…

Game-based environments frequently afford students the opportunity to exert agency over their learning paths by making various choices within the environment. The combination of log data from these systems and dynamic methodologies may serve as a stealth means to assess how students behave (i.e., deterministic or random) within these learning…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are situated in a potential struggle between effective pedagogy and system enjoyment and engagement. iSTART, a reading strategy tutoring system in which students practice generating self-explanations and using reading strategies, employs two devices to engage the user. The first is natural language processing…

This study takes a novel approach toward understanding success in a math course by examining the linguistic features and affect of students' language production within a blended (with both on-line and traditional face to face instruction) undergraduate course (n=158) on discrete mathematics. Three linear effects models were compared: (a) a…

When students exhibit control and employ a strategic plan of action over a situation they are said to be demonstrating agency (Bandura, 2001). The current work is comprised of two studies designed to investigate how agency manifests within students' choice patterns and ultimately influences self-explanation quality within the game-based system…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been successful at improving students' performance across a variety of domains. To help achieve this widespread success, researchers have identified important behavioral and performance measures that can be used to guide instruction and feedback. Most systems, however, do not present these measures to the…

This study investigates a new approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines traditional approaches based on assessing textual features with new approaches that measure student attributes such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining both text features and…

We investigated whether students increased their self-assessment accuracy and essay scores over the course of an intervention with a writing strategy intelligent tutoring system, [Writing Pal] (W-Pal). Results indicate that students were able to learn from W-Pal, and that the combination of strategy instruction, game-based practice, and holistic…

Game-based environments frequently afford students the opportunity to exert agency over their learning paths by making various choices within the environment. The combination of log data from these systems and dynamic methodologies may serve as a stealth means to assess how students behave (i.e., deterministic or random) within these learning…