While automated guidance in online units has been found to successfully support learning, students can sometimes feel alienated rather than motivated due to computerized guidance seeming impersonal. In this study, we explore ways to improve learning and motivation by personalizing adaptive guidance. Standard adaptive guidance is compared to more…

Although researchers call for inquiry learning in science, science assessments rarely capture the impact of inquiry instruction. This paper reports on the development and validation of assessments designed to measure middle-school students' progress in gaining integrated understanding of energy while studying an inquiry-oriented curriculum. The…

Middle school students struggle to explain thermodynamics concepts. In this study, to help students succeed, we use a natural language processing program to analyze their essays explaining the aspects of thermodynamics and provide guidance based on the automated score. The 346 sixth-grade students were assigned to either the critique condition…

We compared two forms of automated guidance to support students' understanding of climate change in an online inquiry science unit. For "specific" guidance, we directly communicated ideas that were missing or misrepresented in student responses. For "knowledge integration" guidance, we provided hints or suggestions to motivate…

This study investigated how professional development featuring evidence-based customization of technology-enhanced curriculum projects can improve inquiry science teaching and student knowledge integration in earth science. Participants included three middle school sixth-grade teachers and their classes of students (N = 787) for three consecutive…

Designing learning experiences that support the development of coherent understanding of complex scientific phenomena is challenging. We sought to identify analytics that can also guide such designs to support retention of coherent understanding. Based on prior research that distributing study of material over time supports retention, we explored…

Both multiple-choice and constructed-response items have known advantages and disadvantages in measuring scientific inquiry. In this article we explore the function of explanation multiple-choice (EMC) items and examine how EMC items differ from traditional multiple-choice and constructed-response items in measuring scientific reasoning. A group…