The Pinyin Tutor has been used the past few years at over thirty institutions around the world to teach students to transcribe spoken Chinese phrases into Pinyin. Large amounts of data have been collected from this program on the types of errors students make on this task. We analyze these data to discover what makes this task difficult and use…

An emerging trend toward computer-mediated collaborative learning environments promotes lively exchanges between learners in order to facilitate learning. Discourse can play an important role in enhancing epistemology, pedagogy, and assessments in these environments. In this paper, we highlight some of our recent work showing the advantages using…

Seeking the right level of help at the right time can support learning. However, in the context of online problem-solving environments, it is still not entirely clear which help-seeking strategies are desired. We use fine-grained data from 38 high school students who worked with the Geometry Cognitive Tutor for 2 months to better understand the…

Research shows that multiple representations can enhance student learning. Many curricula use multiple representations across multiple task types. The temporal sequence of representations and task types is likely to impact student learning. Research on contextual interference shows that interleaving learning tasks leads to better learning results…

A new type of sensor for students' mental states is a single-channel portable EEG headset simple enough to use in schools. To gauge its potential, we recorded its signal from children and adults reading text and isolated words, both aloud and silently. We used this data to train and test classifiers to detect (a) when reading is difficult, (b)…

The research study site is a private, coeducational university located in the Midwest on a small but growing campus that has successfully transitioned from traditional seated students to a mixture of seated and online students from around the world. Two categories of interest to the university are graduate students' writing skills and the…

A plethora of laboratory studies have shown that including the study of worked examples during problem-solving practice improves learning (Sweller, 1999; Sweller & Cooper, 1985). While most worked-example research focuses on the use of correct examples, recent work suggests that asking children to explain a combination of correct and incorrect…

Intelligent tutoring systems are adaptive learning environments designed to support individualized instruction. The adaptation embedded within these systems is often guided by user models that represent one or more aspects of students' domain knowledge, actions, or performance. The proposed project focuses on the development and testing of user…

For at least the last century researchers have advocated the use of student confidence as a form of educational assessment and the growth of online and mobile educational software has made the implementation of this measurement far easier. The following short paper discusses our first study of the dynamics of student confidence in an online math…

Reading comprehension in the content areas is a challenge for many middle grade students. Text structure-based instruction has yielded positive outcomes in reading comprehension at all grade levels in small and large studies. The text structure strategy delivered via the web, called Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy…

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…

Studies which investigate "translanguaging," best practices, and literacy in teaching mathematics for English Language Learners (ELLs) is common in the educational literature. Studies on how ELLs self-efficacy are affected by online cognitive tutors are not common, and there is even less research on how ELLs engage with technology in an…

In this work, we study the effectiveness of a method called Spoken Tutorial, which is a candidate technique for self-learning. The performance of college students who self-learned Java through the Spoken Tutorial method is found to be better than that of conventional learners. Although the method evaluated in this work helps both genders, females…

The aim of this study was to provide a reflection of current trends in higher education, identify some of the changes in student behavior, and potential identification of non-traditional classroom facilitation with the purpose of strengthening active learning and use of technology in the classroom. Non-traditional teaching is emerging in the form…

Recent years have seen a growing interest in intelligent game-based learning environments featuring virtual agents. A key challenge posed by incorporating virtual agents in game-based learning environments is dynamically determining the dialogue moves they should make in order to best support students' problem solving. This paper presents a…