The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally disrupted our thinking about educational technology. Their ability to engage in natural dialogue, provide contextually relevant responses, and adapt to learner needs has led many to envision them as powerful tools for personalized learning. This emergence raises important questions about…

Collaborative dialogue offers rich insights into students' learning and critical thinking. This is essential for adapting pedagogical agents to students' learning and problem-solving skills in STEM+C settings. While large language models (LLMs) facilitate dynamic pedagogical interactions, potential hallucinations can undermine confidence, trust,…

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…

This paper introduces REFLECTSUMM, a novel summarization dataset specifically designed for summarizing students' reflective writing. The goal of REFLECTSUMM is to facilitate developing and evaluating novel summarization techniques tailored to real-world scenarios with little training data, with potential implications in the opinion summarization…

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…

As educators turn to technology to supplement classroom instruction, the integration of natural language processing (NLP) into educational technologies is vital for increasing student success. NLP involves the use of computers to analyze and respond to human language, including students' responses to a variety of assignments and tasks. While NLP…

Intelligent tutoring systems are increasingly used in schools, providing teachers with valuable analytics on student learning. However, many teachers lack the time to review these reports in detail due to heavy workloads, and some face challenges with data literacy. This project investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing applied in education. Solutions vary from handcrafted linguistic features to large Transformer-based models, implying a significant effort in feature extraction and model implementation. We introduce a novel Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) pipeline…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilized to develop tools and services in various domains, including education. However, due to the nature of the training data, these models are susceptible to inherent social or cognitive biases, which can influence their outputs. Furthermore, their handling of critical topics, such as privacy…

Multi-angle question answering models have recently been proposed that promise to perform related tasks like question generation. However, performance on related tasks has not been thoroughly studied. We investigate a leading model called Macaw on the task of multiple choice question generation and evaluate its performance on three angles that…

Readers build a mental representation of text during reading. The coherence building processes readers use to build a mental representation during reading is key to comprehension. We examined the effects of self- explanation on coherence building processes as undergraduates (n =51) read five complementary texts about natural selection and…

Four versions of science and history texts were tailored to diverse hypothetical reader profiles (high and low reading skills and domain knowledge), generated by four Large Language Models (i.e., Claude, Llama, ChatGPT, and Gemini). The Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique was applied to examine variations in Large Language Model (LLM) text…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based assessments are commonly used in a variety of settings including business, healthcare, policing, manufacturing, and education. In education, AI-based assessments undergird intelligent tutoring systems as well as many tools used to evaluate students and, in turn, guide learning and instruction. This chapter…

Modeling reading comprehension processes is a critical task for Learning Analytics, as accurate models of the reading process can be used to match students to texts, identify appropriate interventions, and predict learning outcomes. This paper introduces an improved version of the Automated Model of Comprehension, namely version 4.0. AMoC has its…

Assessments of natural language can provide vast information about individuals' thoughts and cognitive process, but they often rely on time-intensive human scoring, deterring researchers from collecting these sources of data. Natural language processing (NLP) gives researchers the opportunity to implement automated textual analyses across a…