The Common Core assessments emphasize short essay constructed-response items over multiple-choice items because they are more precise measures of understanding. However, such items are too costly and time consuming to be used in national assessments unless a way to score them automatically can be found. Current automatic essay-scoring techniques…

A latent semantic analysis-based automated summary assessment is described; this automated system is applied to a real learning from text task in a Distance Education context. We comment on the use of automated content, plagiarism, text coherence measures, and word weights average and their impact on predicting human judges summary scoring. A…

In this paper we present a software platform called Chatbot designed to introduce high school students to Computer Science (CS) concepts in an innovative way: by programming chatbots. A chatbot is a bot that can be programmed to have a conversation with a human or robotic partner in some natural language such as English or Spanish. While…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between "a" and "b" in "aXb") in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. "The princess 'is' kiss'ing' the frog"). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render…

This paper reports on the development of an analysis engine for the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), an AWE program designed to provide genre and discipline-specific feedback on the functional units of research article discourse. Unlike traditional NLP-based applications that categorize complete documents, the analyzer categorizes every sentence in…

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.'s Letter to the Editor of "Cognitive Science". We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from "normal" (i.e.,…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are situated in a potential struggle between effective pedagogy and system enjoyment and engagement. iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking), a reading strategy tutoring system in which students practice generating self-explanations and using reading strategies, employs two devices…

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…

The study investigated research topics of doctoral dissertations that examined issues in distance learning from 2000-2014. Twelve reviews of research on distance learning, spanning from 1997-2015, were identified. It was found that only one of these reviews of research (Davies, Howell, & Petri, 2010) looked at doctoral dissertations. The…

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…

Infants' disposition to learn repetitions in the input structure has been demonstrated in pattern generalization (e.g., learning the pattern ABB from the token "ledidi"). This study tested whether a repetition advantage can also be found in lexical learning (i.e., learning the word "lele" vs. "ledi"). Twenty-four…

Automatic coding of short text responses opens new doors in assessment. We implemented and integrated baseline methods of natural language processing and statistical modelling by means of software components that are available under open licenses. The accuracy of automatic text coding is demonstrated by using data collected in the "Programme…

This paper discusses a model for structuring resources for automatic assessment in scientific education by means of textual descriptions. This study aims to support instructors in extending teaching strategies and expanding formative assessment in virtual communities of practice. The strategy to achieve these goals involves the implementation of a…

A number of studies have demonstrated strong links between students' language features (as found in spoken and written production) and their math performance. However, no studies have examined links between the students' language features and measures of their Math Identity. This project extends prior studies that use natural language processing…