A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the literature on writing. Previous research suggests that higher quality…

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the literature on writing. Previous research suggests that higher quality…

Game-based environments frequently afford students the opportunity to exert agency over their learning paths by making various choices within the environment. The combination of log data from these systems and dynamic methodologies may serve as a stealth means to assess how students behave (i.e., deterministic or random) within these learning…

Game-based environments frequently afford students the opportunity to exert agency over their learning paths by making various choices within the environment. The combination of log data from these systems and dynamic methodologies may serve as a stealth means to assess how students behave (i.e., deterministic or random) within these learning…

One strength of educational games stems from their potential to increase students' motivation and engagement during educational tasks. However, game features may also detract from principle learning goals and interfere with students' ability to master the target material. To assess the potential impact of game-based learning environments, in this…

iSTART is an intelligent tutoring system designed to provide self-explanation instruction and practice to improve students' comprehension of complex, challenging text. This study examined the effects of extended game-based practice within the system as well as the effects of two metacognitive supports implemented within this practice. High school…

In this study, we investigated the degree to which the cognitive processes in which students engage during reading comprehension could be examined through dynamical analyses of their natural language responses to texts. High school students (n = 142) generated typed self-explanations while reading a science text. They then completed a…

Game-based practice within Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can be optimized by examining how properties of practice activities influence learning outcomes and motivation. In the current study, we manipulated when game-based practice was available to students. All students (n = 149) first completed lesson videos in iSTART-2, an ITS focusing on…

The current study investigates the degree to which the lexical properties of students' essays can inform stealth assessments of their vocabulary knowledge. In particular, we used indices calculated with the natural language processing tool, TAALES, to predict students' performance on a measure of vocabulary knowledge. To this end, two corpora were…

Completion rates for massive open online classes (MOOCs) are notoriously low, but learner intent is an important factor. By studying students who drop out despite their intent to complete the MOOC, it may be possible to develop interventions to improve retention and learning outcomes. Previous research into predicting MOOC completion has focused…

Multimedia instructional materials require learners to select, organize, and integrate information across multiple modalities. To facilitate these comprehension processes, a variety of multimedia design principles have been proposed. This study further explores the redundancy principle by manipulating the degree of partial redundancy between…

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) designed to provide students with explicit writing strategy instruction and practice. W-Pal includes a suite of educational games developed to increase writing engagement and provide opportunities to practice writing strategies. In this study, first (L1) (n = 26) and second (L2)…