In this study, we examined the effect of two metacognitive scaffolds on the accuracy of confidence judgments made while diagnosing dermatopathology slides in SlideTutor. Thirty-one (N = 31) first- to fourth-year pathology and dermatology residents were randomly assigned to one of the two scaffolding conditions. The cases used in this study were…

Automated essay scoring tools are often criticized on the basis of construct validity. Specifically, it has been argued that computational scoring algorithms may be unaligned to higher-level indicators of quality writing, such as writers' demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the essay topics. In this paper, we consider how and whether the…

New tools and technologies are being developed to cater to the e-learning triangle of content, technology, and services. These developments (in technology, needs of students, emergence of new modes of education like MOOCs or flipped classrooms, etc.) have resulted in a change in the approach to teaching. "Innovative Applications of Online…

We introduce an interactive online resource for use by students and college instructors in introductory astronomy courses. The General Education Astronomy Source (GEAS) online tutor guides students developing mastery of core astronomical concepts and mathematical applications of general astronomy material. It contains over 12,000 questions, with…

Solving mathematics story problems requires text comprehension skills. However, previous studies have found few connections between traditional measures of text readability and performance on story problems. We hypothesized that recently developed measures of readability and topic incidence measured by text-mining tools may illuminate associations…

Students in an undergraduate psychology course on Learning and Cognition used SKO (formerly AutoTutor Lite), an Intelligent Tutoring System, to create interactive lessons in which a pedagogic agent (animated avatar) engages users in a tutorial dialogue. After briefly describing the technology and underlying psychological theory, data from an…

Currently there is a global drive among political and educational institutions to implement geographic information system (GIS) practice in secondary schools. However, Geography teachers worldwide, including in South Africa, face significant practical challenges in this regard. Lack of curriculum aligned GIS resources, funds and teacher GIS…

Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) is an effective approach for promoting active learning. When inquiry-based learning is incorporated into instruction, teachers provide guiding questions for students to actively explore the required knowledge in order to solve the problems. Although the World Wide Web (WWW) is a rich knowledge resource for students to…

The majority of adaptive and intelligent tutoring systems (AITS) are dedicated to a specific domain, allowing them to offer accurate models of the domain and the learner. The analysis produced from traces left by the users is didactically very precise and specific to the domain in question. It allows one to guide the learner in case of difficulty…

This study provides a systematic review of mobile assisted language (MALL) research within the specific area of second language acquisition (SLA) during the period of 2005-2012 in terms of research approaches, theories and methods, technology, and the linguistic knowledge and skills' results. The findings show a shift from the prevailing SMS-based…

This paper presents research in Contextual Affect Analysis (CAA) for the need of future application in intelligent agents, such as conversational agents or artificial tutors. The authors propose a new term, Computational Fronesis (CF), to embrace the tasks included in CAA applied to development of conversational agents such as artificial tutors.…

Problem posing, by which learners create new problems by themselves, is an important activity in mathematics education. However, novice learners have difficulty in posing problems, particularly when formulating appropriate solution structures of problems. Although they are provided with example problems that can serve as hints for composing novel…

Educational games have the potential to provide motivating, effective training; however, the efficacy of these systems is unclear, and evaluations often fail to identify the relative impact of individual differences on learning outcomes. The current study aims to address these issues by comparing the learning gains from an educational game…

This study expands upon an existing model of students' reading comprehension ability within an intelligent tutoring system. The current system evaluates students' natural language input using a local student model. We examine the potential to expand this model by assessing the linguistic features of self-explanations aggregated across entire…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have begun to develop hybrid systems that balance the learning benefits of ITSs with the motivational benefits of games. iSTART-ME (Motivationally Enhanced) is a new game-based learning environment developed on top of an existing ITS for reading comprehension (iSTART). In an 11 session lab-based study, 40 high…