Age of Acquisition (AoA) scores approximate the age at which a language speaker fully understands a word's semantic meaning and represent a quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of words in a language. AoA word lists exist across various languages, with English having the most complete lists that capture the largest percentage of the…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are aimed at promoting acquisition of knowledge and skills by providing relevant and appropriate feedback during students' practice activities. ITSs for literacy instruction commonly assess typed responses using Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. One step in this direction often requires building a…

A critical task for tutors is to provide learners with suitable reading materials in terms of difficulty. The challenge of this endeavor is increased by students' individual variability and the multiple levels in which complexity can vary, thus arguing for the necessity of automated systems to support teachers. This chapter describes…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

This study assesses the extent to which machine learning techniques can be used to predict question quality. An algorithm based on textual complexity indices was previously developed to assess question quality to provide feedback on questions generated by students within iSTART (an intelligent tutoring system that teaches reading strategies). In…