We propose an innovative, effective, and data-agnostic method to train a deep-neural network model with an extremely small training dataset, called VELR (Voting-based Ensemble Learning with Rejection). In educational research and practice, providing valid labels for a sufficient amount of data to be used for supervised learning can be very costly…

This study analyzed the influence of rhetoric in the endorsement text on the willingness of the crowd to participate in citizen science projects. Four categories of endorsers were studied: professors, students, industrial researchers, and amateur researchers. Using 1243 endorsement texts from 543 citizen science projects as the corpus, the effects…

Recent advances in publicly available natural language processors (NLP) may enhance the efficiency of analyzing student short-answer responses in physics education research (PER). We train a state-of-the-art NLP, IBM's Watson, and test its agreement with human coders using two different studies that gathered text responses in which students…

Course planning is essential for academic success and the achievement of personal goals. Although universities provide course syllabi and curriculum maps for course planning, integrating and understanding these resources by the learners themselves for effective course planning is time-consuming and difficult. To address this issue, this study…

How can novel AI techniques be made and put to use in the library? Combining methods from data and library science, this article focuses on Natural Language Processing technologies, especially in national libraries. It explains how the National Library of Sweden's collections enabled the development of a new BERT language model for Swedish. It…

Despite a tremendous increase in the use of video for conducting research in classrooms as well as preparing and evaluating teachers, there remain notable challenges to using classroom videos at scale, including time and financial costs. Recent advances in artificial intelligence could make the process of analyzing, scoring, and cataloguing videos…

It is very important to identify talented students as soon as they are admitted to college so that appropriate resources are provided and allocated to them to optimize and excel in their education. Currently, this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, as it involves manual reviews of each student's academic record. This raises the…

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…

Automating the classification of instructional strategies from a large-scale online tutorial dialogue corpus is indispensable to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Despite many existing studies employing supervised machine learning (ML) models to automate the classification process, they concluded that building a…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers methods for understanding and quantifying the similarity between written documents. Within the testing industry these methods have been used for automatic item generation, automated scoring of text and speech, modeling item characteristics, automatic question answering, machine translation, and automated…

This study investigates the potential of automated classification using prompt-based learning approaches with transformer models (large language models trained in an unsupervised manner) for a domain-specific classification task. Prompt-based learning with zero or few shots has the potential to (1) make use of artificial intelligence without…

The majority of Sub-Saharan African countries are facing a very negative teacher-learner ratio: one teacher for over 120 learners. In order to support the learner training, we propose optimizing search engines for learning contexts, to enable learners to take optimal advantage of the vast reservoir of Open Educational Resources (OER) available on…

Digital sandbox games such as "Minecraft" can be used to assess and support creativity. Doing so, however, requires an understanding of what is deemed creative in this game context. One approach is to understand how Minecrafters describe creativity in their communities, and how much those descriptions overlap with the established…

Surveys have long been used in physics education research to understand student reasoning and inform course improvements. However, to make analysis of large sets of responses practical, most surveys use a closed-response format with a small set of potential responses. Open-ended formats, such as written free response, can provide deeper insights…

"A Dictionary of Contemporary Figurative Language" is meant to be an appendix to an earlier, more comprehensive work: ED648945, "A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor 2024." This appendix simply updates the dictionary of that previous work to better reflect the language used during the 2024…