In educational technology and learning sciences, there are multiple uses for a predictive model of whether a student will perform a task correctly or not. For example, an intelligent tutoring system may use such a model to estimate whether or not a student has mastered a skill. We analyze the significance of data recency in making such…

In the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, the Flemish community of Belgium outscored its French community in reading, with low achievers accounting for a large proportion of the score gaps. In this study, between-community comparisons based on the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method showed that the Flemish community benefits…

Bayesian Knowledge Tracing is used very widely to model student learning. It comes in two different forms: The first form is the Bayesian Knowledge Tracing "hidden Markov model" which predicts the probability of correct application of a skill as a function of the number of previous opportunities to apply that skill and the model…

Mixtures of item response theory (IRT) models have been proposed as a technique to explore response patterns in test data related to cognitive strategies, instructional sensitivity, and differential item functioning (DIF). Estimation proves challenging due to difficulties in identification and questions of effect size needed to recover underlying…

This study investigates the impact of students' motivation and personality traits on their academic performance in online and blended learning environments. It was conducted with students attending a mandatory introductory information technology course given in a university in Turkey. The Big Five Inventory and Motivated Strategies for Learning…

There are two primary challenges for instructors in offering a high-quality course at large scale. The first is scaling educational experiences to such a large audience. The second major challenge encountered is that of enabling adaptivity of the educational experience. This thesis addresses both major challenges in the way of high-quality…

The general purpose of this study is to investigate the client-counsellor interaction in the psychological counseling process at the verbal behavior level. The study also aims to analyze the relationship between the behaviors observed in the process with both clients and counsellors' evaluations of sessions and whether changes were observed in…

Psychologists frequently use symptom validity tests (SVTs) to help determine whether evaluees' test performance or reported symptoms accurately represent their true functioning and capability. Most studies evaluating the accuracy of SVTs have used either known-group comparisons or simulation designs, but these approaches have well-known…

We investigated the development of dual-retrieval processes with a low-burden paradigm that is suitable for research with children and neurocognitively impaired populations (e.g., older adults with mild cognitive impairment or dementia). Rich quantitative information can be obtained about recollection, reconstruction, and familiarity judgment by…

When one uses Google (and many people do this!), the result of the query is a list of sites that have something to do with the item one is looking for. The specific sites are always more or less on the top, so it is not necessary to have a look on hundreds of sites to read something relevant and informative. How can Google manage this? How does…

This paper documents the creation, implementation and analysis of a survey instrument designed to reveal patterns of use and attitudes towards the value of social media by UK teachers. The study was motivated to discover which teachers use social media professionally, how they use it (both personally and professionally) and attitudes to social…

The Pinyin Tutor has been used the past few years at over thirty institutions around the world to teach students to transcribe spoken Chinese phrases into Pinyin. Large amounts of data have been collected from this program on the types of errors students make on this task. We analyze these data to discover what makes this task difficult and use…

The maze task is a psycholinguistic experimental procedure that measures real-time incremental sentence processing. The task has recently been tested as a language learning tool with promising results. Therefore, the present study examines the merits of a contextualized version of this task: the story maze. The findings are consistent with…

Considering learning and how to improve students' performances, an adaptive educational system must know how an individual learns best. In this context, this work presents an innovative approach for student modeling through probabilistic learning styles combination. Experiments have shown that our approach is able to automatically detect and…

This work describes a unified approach to two problems previously addressed separately in Intelligent Tutoring Systems: (i) Cognitive Modeling, which factorizes problem solving steps into the latent set of skills required to perform them; and (ii) Student Modeling, which infers students' learning by observing student performance. The practical…