We present work toward automatically assessing and estimating science inquiry skills as middle school students engage in inquiry within a physical science microworld. Towards accomplishing this goal, we generated machine-learned models that can detect when students test their articulated hypotheses, design controlled experiments, and engage in…

When validating assessment models built with data mining, generalization is typically tested at the student-level, where models are tested on new students. This approach, though, may fail to find cases where model performance suffers if other aspects of those cases relevant to prediction are not well represented. We explore this here by testing if…

In recent years, an increasing number of analyses in Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining (EDM) have adopted a "Discovery with Models" approach, where an existing model is used as a key component in a new EDM/analytics analysis. This article presents a theoretical discussion on the emergence of discovery with models, its…