Linguistic properties of writing prompts have been shown to influence the writing patterns contained in student essays. The majority of previous research on these prompt-based effects has focused on the lexical and syntactic properties of writing prompts and essays. The current study expands this research by investigating the effects of prompt…

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…

This article explores the role of text cohesion in the comprehension and production of text. While most discourse models have considered the roles of the text features and the reader, the crucial role of writers' epistemic stance has not been widely considered. The thesis explored here is that levels of cohesion emerge in text based on the…

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…

This study investigates the reliability and validity of the Child Care Ecology Inventory (CCEI), a measure of the quality of family child care in the social domain. The CCEI focuses on research-based environmental features and caregiving practices for promoting positive social development in preschool-age children. A total of 198 family child care…

This study examined how toddlers gain insights from source video displays and use the insights to solve analogous problems. Two- to 2.5-year-olds viewed a source video illustrating a problem-solving strategy and then attempted to solve analogous problems. Older but not younger toddlers extracted the problem-solving strategy depicted in the video…

The positive outcomes derived from participation in Alcoholics Anonymous-related helping (AAH) found among adults has spurred study of AAH among minors with addiction. AAH includes acts of good citizenship in AA, formal service positions, public outreach, and transmitting personal experience to another fellow sufferer. Addiction research with…

The increasing availability of data from multi-site randomized trials provides a potential opportunity to use instrumental variables methods to study the effects of multiple hypothesized mediators of the effect of a treatment. We derive nine assumptions needed to identify the effects of multiple mediators when using site-by-treatment interactions…

We explore the use of instrumental variables (IV) analysis with a multi-site randomized trial to estimate the effect of a mediating variable on an outcome in cases where it can be assumed that the observed mediator is the only mechanism linking treatment assignment to outcomes, as assumption known in the instrumental variables literature as the…

Although writing plays an important role in the academic, psychosocial, and economic success of individuals, typical writing instruction and assessment in the United States generally does not reflect evidence-based practices. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) place a great deal of emphasis on written expression and may encourage an increased…

In a randomized controlled trial, 205 students were followed from grades 1 to 3 with a focus on changes in their writing trajectories following an evidence-based intervention during the spring of second grade. Students were identified as being at-risk (n=138), and then randomized into treatment (n=68) versus business-as-usual conditions (n=70). A…

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'…

In recent years, an increasing number of analyses in Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining (EDM) have adopted a "Discovery with Models" approach, where an existing model is used as a key component in a new EDM/analytics analysis. This article presents a theoretical discussion on the emergence of discovery with models, its…

We present work toward automatically assessing and estimating science inquiry skills as middle school students engage in inquiry within a physical science microworld. Towards accomplishing this goal, we generated machine-learned models that can detect when students test their articulated hypotheses, design controlled experiments, and engage in…