Participating in online communities has significant benefits to students learning in terms of students' motivation, persistence, and learning outcomes. However, maintaining and supporting online learning communities is very challenging and requires tremendous work. Automatic support is desirable in this situation. The purpose of this work is to…

Despite prevalent use and practical application, the current and standard assessment of oral reading fluency (ORF) presents considerable limitations which reduces its validity in estimating growth and monitoring student progress, including: (a) high cost of implementation; (b) tenuous passage equivalence; and (c) bias, large standard error, and…

The Common Core Standards call for students to be exposed to a much greater level of text complexity than has been the norm in schools for the past 40 years. Textbook publishers, teachers, and assessment developers are being asked to refocus materials and methods to ensure that students are challenged to read texts at steadily increasing…