New Pub Archives - EduTec Science

Jun52025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

A Warm Welcome to Our Guest Researcher Yildiz Uzun

New Pub

We are delighted to welcome Yildiz Uzun as a guest researcher in our team! Yildiz is a PhD student at the Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education (IOE), University College London (UCL). Her research explores how students regulate their learning with the support of learning analytics feedback in the form of a dashboard, with a particular focus on how they engage with this feedback. She also examines how engagement with analytics feedback can be scaffolded and enhanced through the integration of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant. During her visit to DIPF, she will collaborate with Prof. Hendrik Drachsler and the EduTec team to advance her current AI-driven feedback process by analysing student queries to the AI assistant, evaluating the pedagogical quality of AI responses and identifying ways to optimise conversational systems…

May302025 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

[Workshop] Introduction to Language Technology and Language Modeling for Education

New Pub

At the recent 19th Joint Summer School on Technology-Enhanced Learning located in Rhetimno, Greece, I (Sebastian Gombert) gave an introductory workshop on language technology and language modeling and their various use cases of in education. This included use cases such as short answer scoring, essay scoring, classification of texts according to the CEFR framework, and group communication analysis in CSCL. Overall, the workshop was well-received and well-attended.

Jan242025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: The Student Feedback Literacy Instrument (SFLI)

Feedback, Further Education, Journal, New Pub

In the context of higher education, feedback plays an especially important role in the learning process. For students it is not only important to receive feedback, but also to be able to understand and process this feedback in a manner which helps them make learning progress. The knowledge, skills and attitudes students need to navigate the feedback process successfully are referred to as feedback literacy. A recently published study presents a refined version of the Student Feedback Literacy Instrument (SFLI), which offers a powerful tool to measure feedback literacy construct across multiple languages and cultures. The SFLI aims to measure feedback literacy across two key dimensions: feedback attitudes and feedback practices. The full-length version of the instrument was recently refined and tested, alongside a short-form version (SFLI-S), in a multilingual…

Nov222024 by Daniele Di MitriNo Comments

New Pub: Impact of Artificial Intelligence Based Systems to Improve Mathematics Achievement in Rural Schools

Artificial Intelligence, Journal, New Pub, School

Poor mathematics achievement, especially in rural areas, remains a persistent challenge. Schools in rural areas often struggle to attract and retain highly qualified mathematics teachers, and the teacher shortage across the United States further amplifies this issue. Numerous studies indicate that AI-based systems can enhance mathematics achievement and improve test scores on both standardized and non-standardized tests in K-12 and higher education. These systems offer adaptive and personalized education tailored to the unique needs of each student. By creating learning pathways based on students' current knowledge and offering real-time feedback and support, AI-based systems have the potential to improve learning outcomes across the P-20 educational spectrum. Despite the increasing adoption of AI-based tools, there is limited research on its impact on K-12 classrooms within rural contexts, especially among socioeconomically disadvantaged…

Oct72024 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: Learning At and From a Virtual Conference

Higher Education, Journal, New Pub

In light of the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis, many academic conferences have switched from face-to-face to virtual or hybrid conferences. The advantages of completely virtual conferences are clear. The organizers don’t need to look for physical rooms to book or need to organize food or drinks for participants. For the participants, this form of conferences can also be advantageous because there are no travel expenses and no travel time. Those participating from other countries can even take part in the conference despite being in different time zones or continents. The advantages go hand in hand with the disadvantages of limited personal interaction: no scientific (or leisurely) discussions during a coffee break or a chance to get to know fellow researchers seated nearby before a session begins. With all…

Jul182024 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: Revolutionizing Essay Scoring with Hierarchical Rater Models

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Higher Education, Journal, New Pub

For a special issue on Natural Language Processing in Psychology we proposed a hierarchical rater model-based approach to address the challenges in automatic essay scoring. Essay writing tests are an integral part of educational systems, essential for assessing students' critical thinking, articulation and understanding. Since the manual scoring process requires significant resources and time, teachers are beginning to use Automated Essay Scoring (AES), which is potentially capable of alleviating the manual effort involved. #AutomatedEssayScoring #NaturalLanguageProcessing #FormativeAssessment #EducationalTechnology #MachineLearning #AIinEducation #HierarchicalRaterModel #EdTech #ScoringAutomation #AI #AssessmentTools #MeasurementInvariance #TransformerModels #EducationResearch #UniversityTesting #AIModels #TechInEducation There are an abundance of available models and each one has its own unique features and scoring methods. Thus, selecting the optimal model is complex and challenging, especially when different aspects of content have to be assessed over a number…

Jul22024 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New pub: Potentials and Challenges of Generative AI in Instruction and Research on Instruction

Artificial Intelligence, Feedback, General education, Journal, New Pub, School

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming such a part of our daily lives that soon it will be almost impossible to imagine life without it. Especially since the emergence of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, endless new possibilities have arisen for the usage of AI in many areas, especially in educational settings. Currently, the effective use of AI in education, both in teaching and learning, remains largely undefined, as do its limitations. We are also missing clarity regarding the potential benefits of AI for instructional research and the ethical boundaries of its use in this field. The opportunities and challenges associated with integrating AI into educational practices and research are explored in a newly published article from Hendrik Drachsler, Knut Neumann and Jochen Kuhn. In their paper they identify specific…

Jun112024 by Fernando P. Cardenas-HernandezNo Comments

The final Consortial Meeting of the MILKI-PSY Project was held in Cologne

Event, New Pub, Project meeting

At the end of May, all project partners of the Multimodal Immersive Learning with Artificial Intelligence for Psychomotor Skills (MILKI-PSY) project convened for the concluding session at the Cologne Game Lab and the German Sport University in Cologne. The project's aim was to develop artificial intelligence-supported, data-driven, multimodal, immersive learning environments for the autonomous acquisition of psychomotor skills. The research outcomes and their corresponding learning tools underwent evaluation. These included a virtual learning environment developed to facilitate the training process, innovative feedback methods to learn and refine movements, and the creation of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications for sports such as golf, dancing, and running. Furthermore, virtual learning scenarios were devised for collaborative tasks with a robot in assembly work. It was demonstrated that innovative, immersive learning environments could…

Jun102024 by Joshua WeidlichNo Comments

New Pub: Emotional and motivational effects of automated and personalized feedback

Computer-supported collaborative learning, Empirical Study, Feedback, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Analytics, New Pub, Open access

With increasingly large student numbers, providing personalized teacher feedback becomes untenable. On the other hand, providing students feedback about their work is an integral part of ensuring student support throughout their learning trajectory. Fortunately, Learning Analytics now makes it feasible to automatically deploy feedback to many students at once. However, the design of effective feedback still remains an area of investigation Joshua Weidlich, Aron Fink, Ioana Jivet, Jane Yau, Tornike Giorgashvili, Hendrik Drachsler, and Andreas Frey's recently published paper in the Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning focused on one key design feature: the reference frame. Any feedback content must be formulated in reference to some performance level, be it the average of the student group (social comparison), the desired performance level (criterion-referenced comparison), or past performance. A longstanding literature on this…

May92024 by Onur KarademirNo Comments

New Pub: I don’t have time! But keep me in the loop: Co-designing requirements for a learning analytics cockpit with teachers

Empirical Study, Learning Analytics, New Pub, Research Methods, School

Teacher dashboards can help secondary school teachers manage online learning activities and inform instructional decisions by visualising information about class learning. However, when designing teacher dashboards, it is not trivial to choose which information to display, because not all of the vast amount of information retrieved from digital learning environments is useful for teaching. Information elicited from formative assessment (FA), though, is a strong predictor for student performance and can be a useful data source for effective teacher dashboards. Especially in the secondary education context, FA and feedback on FA, have been extensively studied and shown to positively affect student learning outcomes. Moreover, secondary teachers struggle to make sense of the information displayed in dashboards and decide on pedagogical actions, such as providing feedback to students. Objectives: To facilitate the…