Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

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,…

Infants appear to progress from universal to language-specific event perception. In Japanese, two different verbs describe a person crossing a "bounded ground" (e.g., street) versus an unbounded ground (e.g., field) while in English, the same verb -- "crossing" -- describes both events. Interestingly, Japanese "and"…

Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…

Teachers may wish to use open-ended learning activities and tests, but they are burdensome to assess compared to forced-choice instruments. At the same time, forced-choice assessments suffer from issues of guessing (when used as tests) and may not encourage valuable behaviors of construction and generation of understanding (when used as learning…

In writing studies research, automated writing evaluation technology is typically examined for a specific, often narrow purpose: to evaluate a particular writing improvement measure, to mine data for changes in writing performance, or to demonstrate the effectiveness of a single technology and accompanying validity arguments. This article adopts a…

Synthesis writing is widely taught across domains and serves as an important means of assessing writing ability, text comprehension, and content learning. Synthesis writing differs from other types of writing in terms of both cognitive and task demands because it requires writers to integrate information across source materials. However, little is…

An intelligent textbook may be considered to be an interaction layer that lies between the text and the student, helping the student to master the content in the text. The Mobile Fact and Concept Training System (MoFaCTS) is an adaptive instructional system for simple content that has been developed into an interaction layer to mediate textbook…

To account for natural variability in cognitive processing, it is standard practice to optimize a model's parameters by fitting it to behavioral data. Although most language-related theories acknowledge a large role for experience in language processing, variability reflecting that knowledge is usually ignored when evaluating a model's fit to…

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…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

Coherent mental models for successful comprehension require inferences that establish semantic "bridges" between discourse constituents and "elaborations" that incorporate relevant background knowledge. While it is established that individual differences in the extent to which postsecondary students engage in these processes…

Writing is a challenge and a potential obstacle for students in U.S. 4-year postsecondary institutions lacking prerequisite writing skills. This study aims to address the research question: Is there a relationship between specific features (analytics) in coursework writing and broader success predictors? Knowledge about this relationship could…

In this study we developed and evaluated a crowdsourcing-based latent semantic analysis (LSA) approach to computerized summary scoring (CSS). LSA is a frequently used mathematical component in CSS, where LSA similarity represents the extent to which the to-be-graded target summary is similar to a model summary or a set of exemplar summaries.…

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…