Use of university students' educational data for learning analytics has spurred a debate about whether and how to provide students with agency regarding data collection and use. A concern is that students opting out of learning analytics may skew predictive models, in particular if certain student populations disproportionately opt out and biases…

Feedback is important to improve writing quality; however, to provide timely and personalized feedback is a time-intensive task. Currently, most literature focuses on providing (human or machine) support on product characteristics, especially after a draft is submitted. However, this does not assist students who struggle "during" the…

Interest in the use of analytics to support evidence-based decision-making in higher education is relatively a new phenomenon. The available research suggests that analytics can enhance an institution's ability to make evidence-based informed decisions that foster growth and increased productivity. The present study explored how institutions of…

When students are first learning to program, they not only have to learn to write programs, but also how to trace them. Code tracing involves stepping through a program step-by-step, which helps to predict the output of the program and identify bugs. Students routinely struggle with this activity, as evidenced by prior work and our own experiences…

Agency refers to the level of control the student has over learning. Most studies on agency in computer-based learning environments have been conducted in the context of educational games and multimedia learning, while there is little research done in the context of learning with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). We conducted a study in the…

The overarching goal of our project is to design effective learning activities for PyKinetic, a smartphone Python tutor. In this paper, we present a study using a variant of Parsons problems we designed for PyKinetic. Parsons problems contain randomized code which needs to be re-ordered to produce the desired effect. In our variant of Parsons…

This study examines the effects of teachable agents' expressed self-efficacy on students. A total of 166 students, 10- to 11-years-old, used a teachable agent-based math game focusing on the base-ten number system. By means of data logging and questionnaires, the study compared the effects of high vs. low agent self-efficacy on the students'…

Cognitive disequilibrium and its affiliated affective state of confusion have been found to positively correlate with learning, presumably due to the effortful cognitive activities that accompany their experience. Although confusion naturally occurs in several learning contexts, we hypothesize that it can be induced and scaffolded to increase…