Application of new automated scoring technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning, makes it possible to provide automated feedback on students' short written responses. Even though many studies investigated the automated feedback in the computer-mediated learning environments, most of them focused on the multiple-choice items instead of the constructed response items. This study focuses on the latter and investigates a formative feedback system integrated into an online science curriculum module teaching climate change.
Inquiry instruction often neglects graphing. It gives students few opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to take advantage of graphs, and which are called for by current science education standards. Yet, it is not well known how to support graphing skills, particularly within middle school science inquiry contexts. Using qualitative graphs is a promising, but underexplored approach.
The success of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and similar reforms is contingent upon the quality of teaching, yet the shifts in teaching practice required are substantial. In this study, we propose and validate a model of adaptive expertise needed for teachers to successfully deliver NGSS-informed computer-supported complex systems curricula in high school science classrooms.
While text-to-speech software has largely made textual information accessible in the digital space, analogous access to graphics still remains an unsolved problem. Because of their portability and ubiquity, several studies have alluded to touchscreens as a potential platform for such access, yet there is still a gap in our understanding of multimodal information transfer in the context of graphics. The current research demonstrates feasibility for following lines, a fundamental graphical concept, via vibrations and sounds on commercial touchscreens.
Implementation of reform curricula requires teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching. Research has provided promising results about the influence of educative curriculum on teachers’ learning and instruction. However, this approach generally focuses on teachers as isolated learners. Using a design-based research approach, the authors developed a web-based tool, iPlan, which provides access to educative curriculum materials in an online interactive learning platform.
Experimentation is one of the important strategies used in engineering design to understand the relationship between relevant variables so that they can be manipulated to generate optimized solution for a particular problem or design. The understanding of students’ experimentation strategies allows educators to help students improve their design experiments by providing scaffolds or guidance. The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ experimentation strategies while they work on a design challenge.
In science and engineering education, the use of heuristics has been introduced as a way of understanding the world, and as a way to approach problem-solving and design. However, important consequences for the use of heuristics are that they do not always guarantee a correct solution. Learning by Design has been identified as a pedagogical strategy that can guide individuals to properly connect science learning via design challenges.
This paper describes HASbot, an automated text scoring and real‐time feedback system designed to support student revision of scientific arguments. Students submit open‐ended text responses to explain how their data support claims and how the limitations of their data affect the uncertainty of their explanations. HASbot automatically scores these text responses and returns the scores with feedback to students. Data were collected from 343 middle‐ and high‐school students taught by nine teachers across seven states in the United States.
