The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent and how connective features and individual differences impact connective…

Student question generation (SQG) is an effective strategy for improving reading comprehension. It helps students improve their understanding of reading materials, metacognitively monitor their comprehension, and self-correct comprehension gaps. Internet technologies have been used to facilitate SQG process through intensive peer support. However,…

Launched in late November 2022, ChatGPT, a large language model chatbot, has garnered considerable attention. However, ongoing questions remain regarding its capabilities. In this study, ChatGPT was used to complete national high school exams in the Netherlands on the topic of English reading comprehension. In late December 2022, we submitted the…

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) made substantial progress with language recognition. Proficiency in spoken English reading is a prerequisite for fluency in written English. However, research on its use, especially for non-native speakers, is lacking despite increased usage. Objectives: This study aimed to enhance the oral reading fluency…

Formative assessment plays a critical role in improving learning outcomes by providing feedback on student mastery. Open-ended questions, which require students to produce multi-word, nontrivial responses, are a popular tool for formative assessment as they provide more specific insights into what students do and do not know. However, grading…

Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

Semantic illusions are recognition errors that occur when an individual fails to notice that information contradicts their prior knowledge (Barton & Sanford, 1993; Erickson & Mattson, 1981). For example, after hearing the question, "If a plane crashes while flying over state lines, where should the survivors be buried?" many…

Research shows that students often struggle with understanding complex academic texts, conducting comprehensive literature reviews, and adhering to the precise requirements of academic writing. One emerging tool that has the potential to address these challenges is SciSpace, an AI-powered platform designed to enhance the academic writing process…

Purpose: Autistic individuals often exhibit poorer emergent literacy skills (e.g., phonological awareness, print knowledge, oral language) relative to their non-autistic peers. Although emergent literacy skills are known to impact future reading success in typical development, their relationship with word recognition and reading comprehension in…

This study incorporates a random forest (RF) approach to probe complex interactions and nonlinearity among predictors into an item response model with the goal of using a hybrid approach to outperform either an RF or explanatory item response model (EIRM) only in explaining item responses. In the specified model, called EIRM-RF, predicted values…

Dialogic reading, when children are read a storybook and engaged in relevant conversation, is a powerful strategy for fostering language development. With the development of artificial intelligence, conversational agents can engage children in elements of dialogic reading. This study examined whether a conversational agent can improve children's…

Automatic short-answer grading has been studied for more than a decade. The technique has been used for implementing auto assessment as well as building the assessor module for intelligent tutoring systems. Many early works automatically grade mainly based on the similarity between a student answer and the reference answer to the question. This…

Noncognitive factors have gained attention in recent years as potential intervention targets for academic achievement improvement in students. Two notable facets, intelligence mindset and grit, have been of particular interest. Both have been shown to consistently improve educational outcomes, although little work has focused on reading ability.…

Children's early literacy skills (ELS) are closely related to literacy learning and reading comprehension performance. Children who cannot acquire early literacy skills face significant difficulties in doing so in the following years. Although it is widely known that children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) perform less well in early…

The topic for this quantitative correlational study was the low proficiency in reading comprehension of graduates in the Jacksonville metropolitan area of North Florida. The research problem explored a statistically significant correlation between the Emotional Quotient score of the Emotional Intelligence inventory and individualized outcome…