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…

The aim of this paper is to provide tools to teachers for monitoring student work and understanding practices in order to help student and possibly adapt exercises in the future. In the context of an online programming learning platform, we propose to study the attempts (i.e., submitted programs) of the students for each exercise by using…

We investigated methods to enhance the generalizability of large language models (LLMs) designed to classify dimensions of collaborative discourse during small group work. Our research utilized five diverse datasets that spanned various grade levels, demographic groups, collaboration settings, and curriculum units. We explored different model…

Deep learning models for text classification have been increasingly used in intelligent tutoring systems and educational writing assistants. However, the scarcity of data in many educational settings, as well as certain imbalances in counts among the annotated labels of educational datasets, limits the generalizability and expressiveness of…

Teacher gesture recognition aims to identify and interpret teacher gestures within academic settings. It has been applied in domains such as teaching performance evaluation, the optimization of online education, and special needs education. However, the background similarity of teacher gestures, the inter-class similarity, and the intra-class…

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…

This study investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models to simulate counselling clients in educational role-plays in comparison to human role-players. Initially, we recorded role-playing sessions, where novice counsellors interacted with human peers acting as clients, followed by role-plays between humans and clients simulated by…

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…

Deep learning-based course recommendation systems often suffer from a lack of interpretability, limiting their practical utility for students and academic advisors. To address this challenge, we propose a modular, post-hoc explanation framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the transparency of deep learning-driven…

The University of Palermo is proud to host the 18th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) in Palermo, Italy, from July 20 to July 23, 2025. EDM is the annual flagship conference of the International Educational Data Mining Society. This year's theme is "New Goals, New Measurements, New Incentives to Learn." The theme…