Writing is essential for success in academics and everyday tasks, but the development of writing skills depends on consistent access to high-quality instruction, extended practice, and personalized feedback. To address these demands and meet students' needs, educators and researchers have turned to technology-based writing tools. Ideally, these…

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is a novel intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that offers writing strategy instruction, game-based practice, essay writing practice, and formative feedback to developing writers. Compared to more tractable and constrained learning domains for ITS, writing is an ill-defined domain because the features of effective writing are…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been successful at improving students' performance across a variety of domains. To help achieve this widespread success, researchers have identified important behavioral and performance measures that can be used to guide instruction and feedback. Most systems, however, do not present these measures to the…

Literacy is a critically important and contemporary issue for educators, scientists, and politicians. Efforts to overcome the challenges associated with illiteracy, and the subsequent development of literate societies, are closely related to those of poverty reduction and sustainable human development. In this paper, the authors examine literacy…

In this chapter, we describe several intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) designed to support student literacy through reading comprehension and writing instruction and practice. Although adaptive instruction can be a powerful tool in the literacy domain, developing these technologies poses significant challenges. For example, evaluating the…

The development of strong writing skills is a critical (and somewhat obvious) goal within the classroom. Individuals across the world are now expected to reach a high level of writing proficiency to achieve success in both academic settings and the workplace (Geiser & Studley, 2001; Powell, 2009; Sharp, 2007). Unfortunately, strong writing…

Work in cognitive and educational psychology examines a variety of phenomena related to the learning and retrieval of information. Indeed, Alice Healy, our honoree, and her colleagues have conducted a large body of groundbreaking research on this topic. In this article we discuss how 3 learning principles (the generation effect, deliberate…

A critical challenge for computer-based writing instruction is providing appropriate and adaptive practice. The current study examined three modes of computer-based writing practice with the goal of identifying those with the greatest learning and motivational value. High school students learned about writing strategies by studying lessons within…

A critical challenge for computer-based writing instruction is providing appropriate and adaptive practice. The current study examined three modes of computer-based writing practice with the goal of identifying those with the greatest learning and motivational value. High school students learned about writing strategies by studying lessons within…

This study investigates how and whether information about students' writing can be recovered from basic behavioral data extracted during their sessions in an intelligent tutoring system for writing. We calculate basic and time-sensitive keystroke indices based on log files of keys pressed during students' writing sessions. A corpus of prompt-based…

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 ability of educational games to promote students' engagement in learning and practice depends on perceived enjoyment of those games. This study investigated high school students' perceptions and enjoyment of games within the Writing Pal intelligent tutoring system. In accord with research on motivation, results showed that perceived…

This study investigates students' essay revising in the context of an intelligent tutoring system called "Writing Pal" (W-Pal), which combines strategy instruction, game-based practice, essay writing practice, and automated formative feedback. We examine how high school students use W-Pal feedback to revise essays in two different…

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)…