Online patient portals that facilitate communication between patient and provider can improve patients' medication adherence and health outcomes. The effectiveness of such web-based communication measures can be influenced by the health literacy (HL) of a patient. In the context of diabetes, low HL is associated with severe hypoglycemia and high…

Text comprehension is an essential skill in today's information-rich world, and self-explanation practice helps students improve their understanding of complex texts. This study was centered on leveraging open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically FLAN-T5, to automatically assess the comprehension strategies employed by readers while…

Self-explanation practice is an effective method to support students in better understanding complex texts. This study focuses on automatically assessing the comprehension strategies employed by readers while understanding STEM texts. Data from 3 datasets (N = 11,833) with self-explanations annotated on different comprehension strategies (i.e.,…

Summarization enhances comprehension and is considered an effective strategy to promote and enhance learning and deep understanding of texts. However, summarization is seldom implemented by teachers in classrooms because the manual evaluation requires a lot of effort and time. Although the need for automated support is stringent, there are only a…

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…

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…