We present an evaluation of the Writing Pal (W-Pal) intelligent tutoring system (ITS) and the W-Pal automated writing evaluation (AWE) system through the use of computational indices related to text cohesion. Sixty-four students participated in this study. Each student was assigned to either the W-Pal ITS condition or the W-Pal AWE condition. The…

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…

Intelligent tutoring systems yield data with many properties that render it potentially ideal to examine using multi-level models (MLM). Repeated observations with dependencies may be optimally examined using MLM because it can account for deviations from normality. This paper examines the applicability of MLM to data from the intelligent tutoring…

Much of the literature surrounding the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems has focused on the type of feedback students receive. Current research suggests that the timing of feedback also plays a role in improved learning. Some researchers have shown that delaying feedback might lead to a "desirable difficulty", where students'…

We introduce a cognitive framework for measuring reading comprehension that includes the use of novel summary-writing tasks. We derive NLP features from the holistic rubric used to score the summaries written by students for such tasks and use them to design a preliminary, automated scoring system. Our results show that the automated approach…

Authoring tools for Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) have been shown to decrease the amount of time that it takes to develop an ITS. However, most of these tools currently do not extend to collaborative ITSs. In this paper, we illustrate an extension to the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) to allow for development of collaborative ITSs that…

Data-mined models often achieve good predictive power, but sometimes at the cost of interpretability. We investigate here if selecting features to increase a model's construct validity and interpretability also can improve the model's ability to predict the desired constructs. We do this by taking existing models and reducing the feature set to…

In this paper we explored whether engaging in two inquiry skills associated with data collection, designing controlled experiments and testing stated hypotheses, within microworlds for one physical science domain (density) impacted the acquisition of inquiry skills in another domain (phase change). To do so, we leveraged educational data mining…

Adaptive learning techniques have typically scheduled practice using learners' accuracy and item presentation history. We describe an adaptive learning system (Adaptive Response Time Based Sequencing--ARTS) that uses both accuracy and response time (RT) as direct inputs into sequencing. Response times are used to assess learning strength and to…