Background: Analyzing student short-answer written justifications to conceptually challenging questions has proven helpful to understand student thinking and improve conceptual understanding. However, qualitative analyses are limited by the burden of analyzing large amounts of text. Purpose: We apply dense and sparse Large Language Models (LLMs)…

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…

As modern vehicles continue to integrate increasingly sophisticated Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles (AV) functions, conventional user manuals may no longer be the most effective medium for conveying knowledge to drivers. This research analysed conventional, paper and video-based instructional methods versus a…

Quality control and assurance plays a fundamental role within higher education contexts. One means by which quality control can be performed is by mapping the course learning outcomes (CLOs) to the program learning outcomes (PLO). This paper describes a system by which this mapping process can be automated and validated. The proposed AI-based…

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…

The development of explanations for scientific phenomena is crucial in science assessment. However, the scoring of students' written explanations is a challenging and resource-intensive process. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to address these challenges, particularly when the explanations are written in English, an…

Current student-centred, multilingual, active teaching methodologies require that teachers have continuous access to texts that are adequate in terms of topic and language competence. However, the task of finding appropriate materials is arduous and time consuming for teachers. To build on automatic readability assessment research that could help…

Purpose: This study examines the accuracy of Interaction Detection in Early Childhood Settings (IDEAS), a program that automatically transcribes audio files and estimates linguistic units relevant to speech-language therapy, including part-of-speech units that represent features of language complexity, such as adjectives and coordinating…

Written answers to open-ended questions can have a higher long-term effect on learning than multiple-choice questions. However, it is critical that teachers immediately review the answers, and ask to redo those that are incoherent. This can be a difficult task and can be time-consuming for teachers. A possible solution is to automate the detection…

In this study, we applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques, within an educational environment, to evaluate their usefulness for automated assessment of students' conceptual understanding from their short answer responses. Assessing understanding provides insight into and feedback on students' conceptual understanding, which is often…

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…

Summarization is an effective strategy to promote and enhance learning and deep comprehension of texts. However, summarization is seldom implemented by teachers in classrooms because the manual evaluation of students' summaries requires time and effort. This problem has led to the development of automated models of summarization quality. However,…

Digitalization and automation of test administration, score reporting, and feedback provision have the potential to benefit large-scale and formative assessments. Many studies on automated essay scoring (AES) and feedback generation systems were published in the last decade, but few connected AES and feedback generation within a unified framework.…

Background: Traditional survey efforts to gather outcome data at scale have significant limitations, including cost, time, and respondent burden. This pilot study explored new and innovative large-scale methods of collecting and validating data from publicly available sources. Taking advantage of emerging data science techniques, we leverage…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a digital communication method that transforms spoken discourse into written text. This rapidly evolving technology is used in email, text messaging, or live video captioning. Current ASR systems operate in conjunction with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to transform speech into text that people…