The Writing Pal is an intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy training. A large part of its artificial intelligence resides in the natural language processing algorithms to assess essay quality and guide feedback to students. Because writing is often highly nuanced and subjective, the development of these algorithms must…

There are two major discussions emerging out of higher education. The first is the dual challenge of increasing completion rates and reducing the cost of instruction. The second is about the impact of technology on higher education, a topic brought to the fore in the past year by the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) phenomenon. The Open Learning…

As an assignment in their course on worldwide religions, a group of Swedish High School pupils followed 12 biblical rules for two weeks, while another group from the same school just imagined the experience. Groups were asked to reflect and write down either how it was (experience) or how it would have been (imagine) to follow the rules. By…

The Indian Institute of Science is proud to host the fully in-person sixteenth iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) during July 11-14, 2023. EDM is the annual flagship conference of the International Educational Data Mining Society. The theme of this year's conference is "Educational data mining for…

This article sets out to explore a shift in the sources of evidence-of-learning in the era of networked computing. One of the key features of recent developments has been popularly characterized as "big data". We begin by examining, in general terms, the frame of reference of contemporary debates on machine intelligence and the role of…

So far, the comprehension and production language modes have typically been studied separately in generative second language acquisition research, with the focus shifting from one to the other. This article revisits the asymmetric relationship between comprehension and production by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of the noun phrase…

An experiment compared the impact of more and less semantically connected sentence contexts on vocabulary learning. Third graders (N = 40) were taught the definitions and meanings of six unfamiliar verbs: "anticipate," "attain," "devise," "restrain," "wield," and "persist." The verbs were…

This study investigated the longitudinal relation between children's theory of mind and their metacognitive knowledge with a special focus on the impact of language on this relation. Measures of theory-of-mind understanding and metamemory knowledge were assessed in 133 3-year-old children at 4 measurement points separated by half-year intervals.…

To address the lack of documented best practices in the development of digital educational games, the authors have previously proposed a reference software architecture. One of its components is the rule system specifying learning and gameplay content. It contains quest, player character, non-player character, environment, and item rules.…

As Web Services and the Semantic Web become more important, enabling technologies such as web service ontologies will grow larger. At the same time, use of mobile devices to access web services has doubled in the last year. The ability of these resource constrained devices to download and reason across these ontologies to support service discovery…

How do new words become established in a speech community? This dissertation documents linguistic, cognitive, and social factors that are hypothesized to affect "lexical entrenchment," the extent to which a new word becomes part of the lexicon of a speech community. First, in a longitudinal corpus study, I find that linguistic properties such as…

With the advent of the Web, the notion of "information retrieval" has acquired a completely new connotation and currently encompasses several disciplines ranging from traditional forms of text and data retrieval in unstructured and structured repositories to retrieval of static and dynamic information from the contents of the surface and deep Web.…

Verb retrieval difficulties are common in aphasia; however, few successful treatments have been documented (e.g. Conroy, P., Sage, K., & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2006). Towards theory-driven therapies for aphasic verb impairments: A review of current theory and practice. "Aphasiology", 20, 1159-1185). This study investigated the efficacy of a novel…

Vygotsky's work on the acquisition of foreign language words has been criticized for lacking a formal view of language as a system and for taking little interest in questions such as the route and rate of language acquisition. We argue that word meanings really do not constitute a formal system, either in the way they develop, or in the way they…

In 3 experiments, we investigated the effect of grammatical gender on object categorization. Participants were asked to judge whether 2 objects, whose names did or did not share grammatical gender, belonged to the same semantic category by pressing a key. Monolingual speakers of English (Experiment 1), Italian (Experiments 1 and 2), and Spanish…