Assessing students' answers and in particular natural language answers is a crucial challenge in the field of education. Advances in transformer-based models such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have led to significant progress in various natural language tasks. Nevertheless, amidst the growing trend of evaluating LLMs across diverse tasks,…

Increased use of computer-based assessments has facilitated data collection processes that capture both response product data (i.e., correct and incorrect) and response process data (e.g., time-stamped action sequences). Evidence suggests a strong relationship between respondents' correct/incorrect responses and their problem-solving proficiency…

The process of generating challenging and appropriate distractors for multiple-choice questions is a complex and time-consuming task. Existing methods for an automated generation have limitations in proposing challenging distractors, or they fail to effectively filter out incorrect choices that closely resemble the correct answer, share synonymous…

Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

This paper introduces REFLECTSUMM, a novel summarization dataset specifically designed for summarizing students' reflective writing. The goal of REFLECTSUMM is to facilitate developing and evaluating novel summarization techniques tailored to real-world scenarios with little training data, with potential implications in the opinion summarization…

Our primary objective in this Special Issue was to respond to potential criticisms of AIED in potentially "perpetuating poor pedagogic practices, datafication, and introducing classroom surveillance" and to comment on the future of AIED in its coming of age. My overarching assumption in response to this line of critiques is that humans…

Large Language Models have recently achieved high performance on many writing tasks. In a recent study, math word problems in Carnegie Learning's MATHia adaptive learning software were rewritten by human authors to improve their clarity and specificity. The randomized experiment found that emerging readers who received the rewritten word problems…

For randomized trials that use text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require that each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by trained human raters. This process, the current standard, is both time-consuming and limiting: even the largest human coding efforts are typically constrained to…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing applied in education. Solutions vary from handcrafted linguistic features to large Transformer-based models, implying a significant effort in feature extraction and model implementation. We introduce a novel Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) pipeline…

It is of critical importance to be aware of the historical discrimination embedded in the data and to consider a fairness measure to reduce bias throughout the predictive modeling pipeline. Given various notions of fairness defined in the literature, investigating the correlation and interaction among metrics is vital for addressing unfairness.…

Competency in skills associated with collaborative problem solving (CPS) is critical for many contexts, including school, the workplace, and the military. Innovative approaches for assessing individuals' CPS competency are necessary, as traditional assessment types such as multiple-choice items are not well suited for such a process-oriented…

To support online learners at a large scale, extensive studies have adopted machine learning (ML) techniques to analyze students' artifacts and predict their learning outcomes automatically. However, limited attention has been paid to the fairness of prediction with ML in educational settings. This study intends to fill the gap by introducing a…

Reweighting a distribution to minimize a distance to a target distribution is a powerful and flexible strategy for estimating a wide range of causal effects, but can be challenging in practice because optimal weights typically depend on knowledge of the underlying data generating process. In this paper, we focus on design-based weights, which do…

Platform-enabled research services will control, manage, and measure learner experiences within that platform. In this paper, we consider the need for research services that examine learner experiences "outside" the platform. For example, we describe an effort to conduct an experiment on peer assessment in a college writing course, where…

Personalized problem selection enhances student practice in tutoring systems. Prior research has focused on transparent problem selection that supports learner control but rarely engages learners in selecting practice materials. We explored how different levels of control (i.e., full AI control, shared control, and full learner control), combined…