David Stephens, a 4th grade teacher in Washington State, was preparing a lesson plan about desert wildlife (all names are pseudonyms). He was planning on assigning his students the chapter book, "Desert Giant: The World of the Saguaro Cactus." The students had divergent knowledge about the topic. For example, Maryam had grown up in…

Intelligent tutoring systems for ill-defined domains, such as reading and writing, are critically needed, yet uncommon. Two such systems, the Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) and Writing Pal (W-Pal) use natural language processing (NLP) to assess learners' written (i.e., typed) responses and provide immediate,…

Reading and comprehending content area texts require learners to effectively select and encode with hierarchically strategic memory structures in order to combine new information with prior knowledge. Unfortunately, evidence from state and national tests shows that children fail to successfully navigate the reading comprehension challenges they…

Planning, conducting, and reporting leading-edge research requires professionals who are capable of highly skilled reading. This study reports the development of an empirically informed computer-based learning environment designed to foster the acquisition of reading comprehension strategies that mediate expertise in the social sciences. Empirical…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…