The problem of poor writing skills at the postsecondary level is a large and troubling one. This study investigated the writing skills of low-skilled adults attending college developmental education courses by determining whether variables from an automated scoring system were predictive of human scores on writing quality rubrics. The human-scored…

Studies attest that learning is facilitated if teaching strategies are in accordance with students learning styles, making learning process more effective and considerably improving students performances. In this context, one major research point--and a challenge--is to efficiently discover students' learning styles. But, the test and validation…

In this study we show how complex creative relations can arise from fairly frequent semantic relations observed in everyday language. By doing this, we reflect on some key cognitive aspects of linguistic and general creativity. In our experimentation, we automated the process of solving a battery of Remote Associates Test tasks. By applying…

A construction project requires collaboration of different organizations such as owner, designer, contractor, and resource suppliers. These organizations need to exchange information to improve their teamwork. Understanding the information created in other organizations requires specialized human resources. Construction cost estimating is one of…

There has been a considerable amount of research over the last few years devoted towards studying what factors lead to student success in online courses, whether for-credit or open. However, there has been relatively limited work towards formally studying which findings replicate across courses. In this paper, we present an architecture to…

When used effectively, reflective writing tasks can deepen learners' understanding of key concepts, help them critically appraise their developing professional identity, and build qualities for lifelong learning. As such, reflective writing is attracting substantial interest from universities concerned with experiential learning, reflective…

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 written work, we compare forms of automated guidance designed to motivate productive revision and help…

Flow is the affective state in which a learner is so engaged and involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. In this sense, to help students in the skill development and knowledge acquisition (referred to as learners' growth process) under optimal conditions, the instructional designers should create learning scenarios that favor…

This paper describes an approach to use automated assessments in online courses. Open edX platform is used as the online courses platform. The new assessment type uses Scilab as learning and solution validation tool. This approach allows to use automated individual variant generation and automated solution checks without involving the course…

This article is intended as a companion document to the more focused report provided by the author at the 2017 American Education Research Association (AERA) Conference as part of the Technology, Instruction, Cognition & Learning Special Interest Group's Symposium on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). Both the AERA talk and this article…

This study sought to provide a framework for evaluating machine score-ability of items using a new score-ability rating scale, and to determine the extent to which ratings were predictive of observed automated scoring performance. The study listed and described a set of factors that are thought to influence machine score-ability; these factors…

As methods for automated scoring of constructed-response items become more widely adopted in state assessments, and are used in more consequential operational configurations, it is critical that their susceptibility to gaming behavior be investigated and managed. This article provides a review of research relevant to how construct-irrelevant…

Content-based automated scoring has been applied in a variety of science domains. However, many prior applications involved simplified scoring rubrics without considering rubrics representing multiple levels of understanding. This study tested a concept-based scoring tool for content-based scoring, c-rater™, for four science items with rubrics…

Question generation is an emerging research area of artificial intelligence in education. Question authoring tools are important in educational technologies, e.g., intelligent tutoring systems, as well as in dialogue systems. Approaches to generate factual questions, i.e., questions that have concrete answers, mainly make use of the syntactical…

Open access institutional repositories can be ill-equipped to manage the complexity of research outputs from departments of fine arts, media, drama, music, cultural heritage, and the creative arts in general. The U.K.-based Kultur project was funded to create a flexible multimedia repository model using EPrints software. The project launched the…