There has been a growing interest in developing learner models to enhance learning and teaching experiences in educational environments. However, existing works have primarily focused on structured environments relying on meticulously crafted representations of tasks, thereby limiting the agent's ability to generalize skills across tasks. In this…

Cloze items are commonly used for both assessing learning and as a learning activity. This paper investigates the selection of sentences for cloze item creation by comparing methods ranging from simple heuristics to deep learning summarization models. An evaluation using human-generated cloze items from three different science texts indicates that…

Automated scoring of student language is a complex task that requires systems to emulate complex and multi-faceted human evaluation criteria. Summary scoring brings an additional layer of complexity to automated scoring because it involves two texts of differing lengths that must be compared. In this study, we present our approach to automate…

This study invested 24 effective and 16 ineffective problem-solving kindergarten children's awareness of metacognitive self-regulated learning (MSRL) while watching other child's problem-solving behaviors. The model in a video performed a task with a trial-and-error approach and finally asked for help. After watching the video, children were asked…

An extended (and probably unnecessary) parallel is drawn between engagement in mathematics and engagement in musical performance. Key facets of engagement are described and a model of how mathematics engagement plays out in task-level activities is discussed in light of new findings related to its social and emotional facets. Implications for…

The number line is a model that is used to measure, count, order and even operate, which requires a symbolic interpretation. Then, we investigate the conceptions of 72 in service secondary teachers, when they manage the model of the number line associated with order, spatial location and the relative position between numbers and marks. In a…

The objective of this article is to describe types of mathematical reasoning evidenced by a middle school mathematics teacher, when answering two generalization questions in a figural pattern generalization task, related to quadratic sequences. Reasoning is delimited from teacher's arguments, reconstructed from a theoretical-methodological…

How can we test whether state-of-the-art generative models, such as Blender and GPT-3, are good AI teachers, capable of replying to a student in an educational dialogue? Designing an AI teacher test is challenging: although evaluation methods are much-needed, there is no off-the-shelf solution to measuring pedagogical ability. This paper reports…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

Language learners are underserved if there are unlearned meanings of a word that they think they have already learned. For example, "circle" as a noun is well known, whereas its use as a verb is not. For artificial-intelligence-based support systems for learning vocabulary, assessing each learner's knowledge of such atypical but common…

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…

Within the context of complex cognitive processing and educational interventions, Woolfolk (2016) makes reference to problem solving acquisition, problem solving retention, and problem solving transfer. In each of the aforementioned types of problem solving activities, problem identification and problem representation (reflecting procedural…

Early prediction of student difficulty during long-duration learning activities allows a tutoring system to intervene by providing needed support, such as a hint, or by alerting an instructor. To be effective, these predictions must come early and be highly accurate, but such predictions are difficult for open-ended programming problems. In this…

This research targets children's informal strategies and knowledge of fractions by examining their ability to create, interpret, and connect representations in doing and communicating mathematics when solving fractions tasks. Our research group followed a constant comparative method to analyze clinical interviews of children in grades 2-6 solving…

In an effort to better align item development to goals of assessing higher-order tasks and decision making, complex decision trees were developed to follow clinical reasoning scripts and used as models on which multiple-choice questions could be built. This approach is compatible with best-practice assessment frameworks like Evidence Centered…