Driven by our technologically advanced workplaces and the surge in demand for proficiency in the computing disciplines, it is becoming imperative to provide computational thinking (CT) opportunities to all students. One approach for making computing accessible and relevant to learning and problem-solving in K-12 environments is to integrate it…

While exam-style questions are a fundamental educational tool serving a variety of purposes, manual construction of questions is a complex process that requires training, experience, and resources. This, in turn, hinders and slows down the use of educational activities (e.g. providing practice questions) and new advances (e.g. adaptive testing)…

The effect of metacognitive scaffolding for learning by teaching was investigated and compared against learning by being tutored. Three versions of an online learning environment for learning algebra equations were created: (1) APLUS that allows students to interactively teach a synthetic peer with a goal to have the synthetic peer pass the quiz…

The goal of this study was to examine college students' (n = 61) contextualized emotions during in-game actions while playing "Crystal Island," a game-based learning environment where students are tasked with solving the mystery of what illness impacted all island inhabitants. We examined emotions during in-game actions: during book…

This study investigated how preschool children processed and understood critical information in Magical Garden, a teachable agent-based play-&-learn game targeting early math. We analyzed 36 children's (ages 4-6 years) real-time behavior during game-use to explore whether children: (i) processed the information meant to support number sense…

Along with substantial consensus around the power of active learning, comes some lack of precision in what its essential ingredients are. New educational technologies offer vehicles for systematically exploring benefits of alternative techniques for supporting active learning. We introduce a new genre of Intelligent Science Station technology that…

Cloud computing offers developers of learning environments access to unprecedented amounts of learner data. This makes possible "data-driven development" (D[superscript 3]) of learning environments. In the D[superscript 3] approach the learning environment is a data collection tool as well a learning tool. It continually collects data…

The 2017 ASSISTments Data Mining competition aims to use data from a longitudinal study for predicting a brand-new outcome of students which had never been studied before by the educational data mining research community. Specifically, it facilitates research in developing predictive models that predict whether the first job of a student out of…

Advances in computer technology and artificial intelligence create opportunities for developing adaptive language learning technologies which are sensitive to individual learner characteristics. This paper focuses on one form of adaptivity in which the difficulty of learning content is dynamically adjusted to the learner's evolving language…

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…

In the domain of programming, a growing number of algorithms automatically generate data-driven, next-step hints that suggest how students should edit their code to resolve errors and make progress. While these hints have the potential to improve learning if done well, few evaluations have directly assessed or compared the quality of different…

The rich data that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms collect on the behavior of millions of users provide a unique opportunity to study human learning and to develop data-driven methods that can address the needs of individual learners. This type of research falls into the emerging field of "learning analytics." However,…

We present a technique that examines handwritten equations from a student's solution to an engineering problem and from this estimates the correctness of the work. More specifically, we demonstrate that lexical properties of the equations correlate with the grade a human grader would assign. We characterize these properties with a set of features…

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…

Describing the competencies required by a profession is essential for aligning online profiles of job seekers and job advertisements. Comparing the competencies described within each context has typically not be done, which has generated a complete disconnect in language between them. This work presents an approach for the alignment of online…