Publication Archives - Page 2 of 20

Nov62025 by Nina MouhammadNo Comments

New Pub: From Nervous to Noteworthy: Evaluating SPEAKS

Competence development, Conference, Conference, Higher Education

Public speaking can be nerve-wracking, but it’s also a skill every professional needs. Many students leave higher education feeling unprepared to speak confidently in front of an audience. Traditional courses exist, but providing enough guidance to every student is time- and resource-intensive. This is where SPEAKS comes in. SPEAKS (Speech content Preparation for Effective and Authentic Knowledge Sharing) is an educational software designed to guide students through preparing the content of their speeches. The tool and its evaluation were presented at ECEL 2025 in a paper authored by Nina Mouhammad, Jan Schneider, Roland Klemke and Daniele Di Mitri as part of the HyTea-project, highlighting its potential to support students in developing better speech content and becoming more confident regarding public speaking. The tool uses a fully scripted, chat-based interface with…

Oct312025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: Optimizing Formative Assessment with Learning Analytics

Assessment, Learning Analytics, Literature review, New Pub

The teaching and learning processes in education need to be effective. This is something that all parents, teachers and educational scientists can agree on. To help us track the learners’ achievements and educational progress and ultimately show whether the teaching and learning processes are effective, we rely on formative assessment. Learning analytics has the potential to assist in formative assessment. So far there has not been enough evidence collected to prove this potential support. Thus, many have reservations about the connection between the results of learning analytics and formative assessment models. If the results from learning analytics don’t match well with formative assessment approaches, teachers may be reluctant to trust, understand or use those insights to guide their teaching. This issue is addressed in a recently published study which introduces…

Oct312025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: ChatGPT in Education

Journal, New Pub, Research Methods

Early studies on the usage of ChatGPT in educational settings have reported substantial learning gains from ChatGPT applications. But how valid are these studies? Is using ChatGPT in education really as effective as it seems? A newly published paper takes a deeper look at key findings from past debates about media and teaching methods to reveal frequent conceptual challenges that arise in studies about the effectiveness of ChatGPT. When researchers compare different types of media for learning, they sometimes mix up the effects of the teaching style with the features of the technology. If the instructional methods and the technological features are confused with one another, it makes it difficult to be able to interpret the actual effect of ChatGPT. To help pinpoint the conceptual difficulties of these efficacy studies,…

Sep172025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: Design, Development and Evaluation of HILA

Artificial Intelligence, Keynote, Learning Analytics, Publication

How can AI-supported learning analytics be integrated into educational processes in a significant way? How can they be designed, tested and further developed to effectively improve teaching and learning practices? These questions were addressed by Hendrik Drachsler in his keynote at the Learning AID 2024 in Bochum, which has recently been published in the conference proceeding “Learning Analytics, Artificial Intelligence und Data Mining in der Hochschulbildung”. In his keynote, Hendrik stresses the importance of content-specific applications that address genuine educational needs and are supported by empirical evidence demonstrating their effectiveness. The key to fostering adaptive and sustainable learning experiences is to understand and accommodate learners’ individual needs. Hendrik argues that technological progress alone is not sufficient to improve education. His ongoing research shows that AI-supported learning analytics can only bring…

Jul282025 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

New Pub: TBA at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Transfer-Learning from DARE-TIES Merged Models for the Pedagogical Ability Assessment of LLM-Powered Math Tutors

New Pub

In the BEA 2025 Shared Task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-Powered Tutors, the goal was to evaluate how well LLM-based math tutors support students. The task focused on four aspects of feedback: spotting mistakes identifying where the mistake happens giving guidance providing actionable suggestions For our submission, we built on FLAN-T5 models with a multi-step training pipeline. In addition to standard fine-tuning, we used model merging (DARE-TIES) to leverage information across all four labels – and saw clear improvements over plain fine-tuning. Our models achieved F1 scores between 52 and 69 and accuracies between 62% and 87%, ranking 11th, 8th, 11th, and 9th across the four tracks. Link to the paper: Link

Jul212025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: How Feedback Literacy Moderates Student Perceptions of Feedback

Feedback, Higher Education, Journal, New Pub

Whether or not students receive effective feedback can have a big impact on their overall learning process. The more qualitative and personalized the feedback is, the more effective it is in supporting the students with their individual learning goals. The latest developments in learning analytics and artificial intelligence have made it possible to provide a large number of students with personalized feedback automatically and simultaneously. Despite these technical advances, there is still much to be learned about the ability of students to use this feedback for their scholastic benefit. So far, only a limited number of studies have examined the impact of feedback literacy on students' perceptions of feedback, which is particularly true for technology-enhanced learning environments. A newly published paper addresses this issue and focuses on how students interpret…

Jun272025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: How Learners Interpret and Respond to Feedback in Learning Analytics Dashboards

Feedback, Journal, New Pub, Self-Regulation

Online learning platforms can generate a great amount of data about how students engage in the learning process. This data is used to develop learning analytics dashboards as feedback tools to assist students in self-regulating their learning. But how do students use these tools to self-reflect? And how can they use the information provided by learning analytics dashboards (LAD) in a meaningful way? In a new publication these questions are explored using the data from an experimental study with 417 students, which investigated how the students interpret and respond to feedback from LADs. In the study, the students were divided into 2 groups: A treatment group was given personalized self-regulated learning (SRL) feedback from the LAD on the basis of interactions and progress; A control group was given minimal feedback…

Jun122025 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: Tracking students’ progression in developing understanding of energy using AI technologies

Artificial Intelligence, Journal, Publication, School

[caption id="attachment_7553" align="alignright" width="400"] Instructional unit, with pre- and post-test, as well as lesson-set-level assessment[/caption] In physics education, some students fail to have the foundational knowledge of energy concepts needed to engage in societal debates on climate change and energy transformation. A newly published study highlights the potential of AI to identify students with different learning trajectories and to help bridge the knowledge gaps. The researchers used a digital workbook designed to teach energy concepts to collect detailed interaction data from over 500 students. After applying exclusion criteria, data from 172 students were analyzed to identify their productive and unproductive learning curves. [caption id="attachment_7554" align="alignleft" width="400"] Example single choice pretest item[/caption] By using machine learning, specifically random forest models, and natural language processing (NLP), the researchers were able to classify…

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.