This article aims to analyse Italian universities' official websites discursive practices to assess their involvement in the university third mission: the contribution by universities to the social and economic development of the environment in which they act. To achieve it, textual data were extracted from the official websites of the 91 Italian…

This study explores how discussing metaphors for AI can help build awareness of the frames that shape our understanding of AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Given the pressing need to teach "critical AI literacy", discussion of metaphor provides an opportunity for inquiry and dialogue with space for…

Artificial intelligence (AI) for supporting second language (L2) writing processes and practices has garnered increasing interest in recent years, establishing AI-mediated L2 writing as a new norm for many multilingual classrooms. As such, the emergence of AI-mediated technologies has challenged L2 writing instructors and their philosophies…

The term Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) covers many different aspects of CALL that add something extra to a CALL resource. This could be with the use of computational linguistics or Artificial Intelligence (AI). ICALL tends to be not very well understood within the CALL community. There may also be the slight fear factor…

Purpose: With the growth of digital education, students increasingly interact in a variety of ways. The potential effects of these interactions on their learning process are not fully understood and the outcomes may depend on the tool used. This study explores the communication patterns and learning effectiveness developed by students using two…

An overarching motivation driving my research has been to further our theoretical understanding of how readers successfully comprehend challenging text. This article describes the theoretical origins of this research program and my quest to understand comprehension processes through the use of technology. Coh-Metrix was developed to measure, and…

An overarching motivation driving my research has been to further our theoretical understanding of how readers successfully comprehend challenging text. This article describes the theoretical origins of this research program and my quest to understand comprehension processes through the use of technology. Coh-Metrix was developed to measure, and…

As students learn how to program, both their programming code and their understanding of it evolves over time. In this work, we present a general data-driven approach, named "Temporal-ASTNN" for modeling student learning progression in open-ended programming domains. Temporal-ASTNN combines a novel neural network model based on abstract…

In this study, we work towards a strategy to measure and enhance the quality of interactions in discussion forums at scale. We present a machine learning (ML) model which identifies the phase of cognitive presence exhibited by a student's post and suggest future applications of such a model to help online students develop higher-order thinking. We…

Learning computer programming is a challenging task for most beginners. Demotivation and learned helplessness are pretty common. A novel instructional technique that leverages the value-expectancy motivational model of student learning was conceptualized by the author to counter the lack of motivation in the introductory class. The result was a…

Language is central to education, being the core medium of instruction. Researchers and practitioners have long used manual methods to analyze instructional language like classroom discourse and instructional texts, with the goal of facilitating student-centered instruction. In this dissertation, I offer three studies demonstrating how natural…

In the age of rapid technological advancements, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and large language models (LLMs) in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education has emerged as a transformative force, reshaping pedagogical approaches and assessment methodologies. "Uses of AI in STEM…

Building and checking concept maps is an active research topic in visual learning. Concept maps are intended to show visual representations of interrelated concepts in educational and professional settings. For the last decades, numerous formulas have been proposed to compute the semantic proximity between any pair of concepts in the map. A review…

Law enforcement agencies in Brazil communicate with each other using documents formalized in a language predominantly written in pure text. However, postmodern criminal organizations play complex roles, making it difficult to describe their actions using only text. Visual memory is relevant to learning and thus should be applied. Learning about…

In 'Against Stored Abstractions,' Ambridge uses neural and computational evidence to make his case against abstract representations. He argues that storing only exemplars is more parsimonious -- why bother with abstraction when exemplar models with on-the-fly calculation can do everything abstracting models can and more -- and implies that his…