Creativity is highly valued in both education and the workforce, but assessing and developing creativity can be difficult without psychometrically robust and affordable tools. The open-ended nature of creativity assessments has made them difficult to score, expensive, often imprecise, and therefore impractical for school- or district-wide use. To…

For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

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…

Despite the critical role of teachers in the educational process, few advanced learning technologies have been developed to support teacher-instruction or professional development. This lack of support is particularly acute for middle school math teachers, where only 37% felt well prepared to scaffold instruction to address the needs of diverse…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have consistently been shown to improve the educational outcomes of students when used alone or combined with traditional instruction. However, building an ITS is a time-consuming process which requires specialized knowledge of existing tools. Extant authoring methods, including the Cognitive Tutor Authoring…

Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are expensive to develop. While simple online courseware could be easily authored by teachers, the authoring of conversational ITSs usually involves a team of experts with different expertise, including domain experts, linguists, instruction designers, programmers, artists, computer scientists,…

This paper investigates whether voice assistants can play a useful role in the specialized work-life of the knowledge worker (in a biology lab). It is motivated both by promising advances in voice-input technology, and a long-standing vision in the community to augment scientific processes with voice-based agents. Through a reflection on our…

When a smart device talks, what should its voice sound like? Voice-enabled devices are becoming a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. Simultaneously, speech synthesis technology is rapidly improving, making it possible to generate increasingly varied and realistic computerized voices. Despite the flexibility and richness of expression that…

Audio-visual recording and location tracking produce enormous quantities of digital data with which researchers can document children's everyday interactions in naturalistic settings and assessment contexts. Machine learning and other computational approaches can produce replicable, automated measurements of these big behavioral data. The…

Choosing where to apply to college is a complex problem with long-term consequences, but many students lack the guidance necessary to make optimal choices. I show that a technology which provides low-cost personalized college admissions information to over forty percent of high schoolers significantly alters college choices. Students shift…

Involving stakeholders throughout the creation of new educational technologies can help ensure their usefulness and usability in real-world contexts. However, given the complexity of learning analytics (LA) systems, it can be challenging to meaningfully involve non-technical stakeholders throughout their design and development. This article…

We argue in this paper that there is currently no adequate theoretical framework or model that spans the twelve odd year trajectory from non-reader to proficient reader, nor addresses fine-grain skill acquisition, mastery and integration. The target construct itself, reading proficiency, as often operationalized as an endpoint of formal secondary…

Consistency of learning behaviors is known to play an important role in learners' engagement in a course and impact their learning outcomes. Despite significant advances in the area of learning analytics (LA) in measuring various self-regulated learning behaviors, using LA to measure consistency of online course engagement patterns remains largely…

This study presents a novel video recommendation system for an algebra virtual learning environment (VLE) that leverages ideas and methods from engagement measurement, item response theory, and reinforcement learning. Following Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory, but considering low affect and high affect students separately, we…

While hierarchical machine learning approaches have been used to classify texts into different content areas, this approach has, to our knowledge, not been used in the automated assessment of text difficulty. This study compared the accuracy of four classification machine learning approaches (flat, one-vs-one, one-vs-all, and hierarchical) using…