The growing demand for microcredentials in education and workforce development necessitates scalable, accurate, and fair assessment systems for both soft and hard skills based on students' lived experience narratives. Existing approaches struggle with the complexities of hierarchical credentialing and the mitigation of algorithmic bias related to…

Combining formative practice with the primary expository content in a learning by doing method is a proven approach to increase student learning. Artificial intelligence has led the way for automatic question generation (AQG) systems that can generate volumes of formative practice otherwise prohibitive with human effort. One such AQG system was…

We propose a novel method for automated short answer grading (ASAG) designed for practical use in real-world settings. The method combines LLM embedding similarity with a nonlinear regression function, enabling accurate prediction from a small number of expert-graded responses. In this use case, a grader manually assesses a few responses, while…

The process of generating challenging and appropriate distractors for multiple-choice questions is a complex and time-consuming task. Existing methods for an automated generation have limitations in proposing challenging distractors, or they fail to effectively filter out incorrect choices that closely resemble the correct answer, share synonymous…

Automated multiple-choice question (MCQ) generation is valuable for scalable assessment and enhanced learning experiences. How-ever, existing MCQ generation methods face challenges in ensuring plausible distractors and maintaining answer consistency. This paper intro-duces a method for MCQ generation that integrates reasoning-based explanations…

Recent advances in AI have opened the door for the automated scoring of open-ended math problems, which were previously much more difficult to assess at scale. However, we know that biases still remain in some of these algorithms. For example, recent research on the automated scoring of student essays has shown that certain varieties of English…

Open-text responses provide researchers and educators with rich, nuanced insights that multiple-choice questions cannot capture. When reliably assessed, such responses have the potential to enhance teaching and learning. However, scaling and consistently capturing these nuances remain significant challenges, limiting the widespread use of…

Short answer assessment is a vital component of science education, allowing evaluation of students' complex three-dimensional understanding. Large language models (LLMs) that possess human-like ability in linguistic tasks are increasingly popular in assisting human graders to reduce their workload. However, LLMs' limitations in domain knowledge…

Knowledge tracing models have enabled a range of intelligent tutoring systems to provide feedback to students. However, existing methods for knowledge tracing in learning sciences are predominantly reliant on statistical data and instructor-defined knowledge components, making it challenging to integrate AI-generated educational content with…

The growing need for automated and personalized feedback in programming education has led to recent interest in leveraging generative AI for feedback generation. However, current approaches tend to rely on prompt engineering techniques in which predefined prompts guide the AI to generate feedback. This can result in rigid and constrained responses…

The effectiveness of feedback in enhancing learning outcomes is well documented within Educational Data Mining (EDM). Various prior research have explored methodologies to enhance the effectiveness of feedback to students in various ways. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their utility in enhancing automated…

We explore how different components of an Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) model affect the model's ability to generalize to questions outside of those used for training. For supervised automatic grading models, human ratings are primarily used as ground truth labels. Producing such ratings can be resource heavy, as subject matter experts…

Today, there is a vast amount of online material for learners. However, due to the lack of prerequisite information needed to master them, a lot of time is spent in identifying the right learning content for mastering these concepts. A system that captures underlying prerequisites needed for learning different concepts can help improve the quality…

The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots has created a great deal of discussion in the education community. While many have gravitated towards the ability of these bots to make learning more interactive, others have grave concerns that student created essays, long used as a means of assessing the subject comprehension of students, may…

The current study explores the ability to predict argumentative claims in structurally-annotated student essays to gain insights into the role of argumentation structure in the quality of persuasive writing. Our annotation scheme specified six types of argumentative components based on the well-established Toulmin's model of argumentation. We…