Adaptive collaborative learning support (ACLS) involves collaborative learning environments that adapt their characteristics, and sometimes provide intelligent hints and feedback, to improve individual students' collaborative interactions. ACLS often involves a system that can automatically assess student dialogue, model effective and…

Effective mathematics teachers have a large body of professional knowledge, which is largely undocumented and shared by teachers working in a given country's education system. The volume and cultural nature of this knowledge make it particularly challenging to share curricula and instructional methods between countries. Thus, approaches based…

The ASSISTments project is an ecosystem of a few hundred teachers, a platform, and researchers working together. Development professionals help train teachers and get teachers to participate in studies. The platform and these teachers help researchers (sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly) simply by using content the teacher selects. The…

The Hint Factory is an implementation of our novel method to automatically generate hints using past student data for a logic tutor. One disadvantage of the Hint Factory is the time needed to gather enough data on new problems in order to provide hints. In this paper we describe the use of expert sample solutions to "seed" the hint generation…

This paper describes a Conceptual Framework underpinning "Systems that Care" in terms of educational systems that take account of motivation, metacognition and affect, in addition to cognition. The main focus is on "motivation," as learning requires the student to put in effort and be engaged, in other words to be motivated to learn. But…

Two critical issues of the typical computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) systems are inappropriate selection of student groups and inaccurate assessment of individual contributions of the group members. Inappropriate selection of student groups often leads to ineffective and inefficient collaboration, while inaccurate assessment of…

Cognitive approaches have been used for student modeling in intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Many of those systems have tackled fundamental subjects such as mathematics, physics, and computer programming. The change of the student's cognitive behavior over time, however, has not been considered and modeled systematically. Furthermore, the…

An emerging trend in classrooms is the use of networked visual argumentation tools that allow students to discuss, debate, and argue with one another in a synchronous fashion about topics presented by a teacher. These tools are aimed at teaching students how to discuss and argue, important skills not often taught in traditional classrooms. But how…

A student conceptual model can be defined as a set of interconnected concepts associated with an estimation value that indicates how well these concepts are used by the students. It can model just one student or a group of students, and can be represented as a concept map, conceptual diagram or one of several other knowledge representation…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are effective tools for education. However, developing them is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process. A major share of the effort is devoted to acquiring the domain knowledge that underlies the system's intelligence. The goal of this research is to reduce this knowledge acquisition bottleneck and better…

The Tactical Language and Culture Training System (TLCTS) helps learners acquire basic communicative skills in foreign languages and cultures. Learners acquire communication skills through a combination of interactive lessons and serious games. Artificial intelligence plays multiple roles in this learning environment: to process the learner's…

This paper describes the role of simulation-based training in the military. Interviews and observations of military instructors in the damage control and shiphandling domains provide examples of how the instructors extend the student's training beyond the well-defined simulated world with qualitative reasoning about context, hypothetical variants,…

One of the critical factors contributing to the effectiveness of human tutoring is the conversational aspect of the instruction. Our goal is to develop a general model for supporting dialogues with menu-based input that could be used in both well- and ill-defined instructional tasks. We have previously studied how human tutors provide additional…

In this paper, we introduce logic programming as a domain that exhibits some characteristics of being ill-defined. In order to diagnose student errors in such a domain, we need a means to hypothesise the student's intention, that is the strategy underlying her solution. This is achieved by weighting constraints, so that hypotheses about solution…

In this paper we consider prior definitions of the terms "ill-defined domain" and "ill-defined problem". We then present alternate definitions that better support research at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Education. In our view both problems and domains are ill-defined when essential concepts, relations, or criteria are un- or…