Games in service of learning are uniquely positioned to offer immersive, interactive educational experiences. Well-designed games build challenge through a series of well-ordered problems or activities, in which perseverance is key for working through ingame failure and increasing game difficulty. Indeed, persistence through challenges during…

We present results of a randomized controlled study that compared different types of affective messages delivered by pedagogical agents. We used animated characters that were empathic and emphasized the malleability of intelligence and the importance of effort. Results showed significant correlations between students who received more…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…

This study introduces the Constructed Response Analysis Tool (CRAT), a freely available tool to automatically assess student responses in online tutoring systems. The study tests CRAT on a dataset of chemistry responses collected in the ChemVLab+. The findings indicate that CRAT can differentiate and classify student responses based on semantic…

"OperationARIES!" is an Intelligent Tutoring System that teaches scientific inquiry skills in a game-like atmosphere. Students complete three different training modules, each with natural language conversations, in order to acquire deep-level knowledge of 21 core concepts of research methodology (e.g., correlation does not mean…