The paper tackles a central question in the field of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL): How can language learning tasks be conceptualized and made explicit in a way that supports the pedagogical goals of current Foreign Language Teaching and Learning and at the same time provides an explicit characterization of the Natural…

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 linguistic factors that relate to misalignment between students' and teachers' ratings of essay quality. Students (n = 126) wrote essays and rated the quality of their work. Teachers then provided their own ratings of the essays. Results revealed that students who were less accurate in their self-assessments produced essays that…

Research has identified a number of linguistic features that influence the reading comprehension of young readers; yet, less is known about whether and how these findings extend to adult readers. This study examines text comprehension, processing, and familiarity judgment provided by adult readers using a number of different approaches (i.e.,…

This study explores the construct validity of speaking tasks included in the TOEFL iBT (e.g., integrated and independent speaking tasks). Specifically, advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools, MANOVA difference statistics, and discriminant function analyses (DFA) are used to assess the degree to which and in what ways responses to these…

Archived transcripts from tens of millions of online human tutoring sessions potentially contain important knowledge about how online tutors help, or fail to help, students learn. However, without ways of automatically analyzing these large corpora, any knowledge in this data will remain buried. One way to approach this issue is to train an…

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on the study of how utterances composed of human-level languages can be understood and generated. Typically, there are considered to be three intertwined levels of structure that interact to create meaning in language: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not only is a large amount of…

This dissertation, which comprises three independent essays, explores the dynamics of online user behavior and provides IS policy implications across three different applications. The first essay employs an econometric empirical analysis to examine the role of IT interventions on online users' gambling behavior, based on field data collected over…

We have assembled a large corpus of student submissions to an automatic grading system, where the subject matter involves the translation of natural language sentences into propositional logic. Of the 2.3 million translation instances in the corpus, 286,000 (approximately 12%) are categorized as being in error. We want to understand the nature of…

Critical review skill is one important aspect of academic writing. Generic trigger questions have been widely used to support this activity. When students have a concrete topic in mind, trigger questions are less effective if they are too general. This article presents a learning-to-rank based system which automatically generates specific trigger…

Work in cognitive and educational psychology examines a variety of phenomena related to the learning and retrieval of information. Indeed, Alice Healy, our honoree, and her colleagues have conducted a large body of groundbreaking research on this topic. In this article we discuss how 3 learning principles (the generation effect, deliberate…

The paper describes a biology tutoring system with adaptive question selection. Questions were selected for presentation to the student based on their utilities, which were estimated from the chance that the student's competence would increase if the questions were asked. Competence was represented by the probability of mastery of a set of biology…

Students studying complex science topics can benefit from receiving immediate, personalized guidance. Supporting students to revise their written explanations in science can help students to integrate disparate ideas and develop a coherent, generative account of complex scientific topics. Using natural language processing to analyze student…

Assessment in education allows for obtaining, organizing, and presenting information about how much and how well the student is learning. The current paper aims at analysing and discussing some of the most state-of-the-art assessment systems in education. Later, this work presents a specific use case developed for the Universitat Oberta de…

We live in an era of information overload. From online news to online shopping to scholarly research, we are inundated with a torrent of information on a daily basis. With our limited time, money and attention, we often struggle to extract actionable knowledge from this deluge of data. A common approach for addressing this challenge is…