Evaluation of student understanding of learning material is critical to effective teaching. Current computer-aided evaluation tools exist, such as Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT); however, they require expert knowledge to implement and update. We propose a novel task, to create an evaluation tool that can predict student performance (knowledge) based on general performance on test questions without expert curation of the questions or expert understanding of the evaluation tool. We implement two methods for creating such a tool, find both methods lacking, and urge further investigation.

Submitted by Liliane Ferreira (ljuvencia30@gmail.com) on 2018-02-23T11:03:35Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Santiago Lemos - 2017.pdf: 3828385 bytes, checksum: 09861e5edb8eb07812e42699fd84af93 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2018-02-23T13:00:01Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Santiago Lemos - 2017.pdf: 3828385 bytes, checksum: 09861e5edb8eb07812e42699fd84af93 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-23T13:00:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Santiago Lemos - 2017.pdf: 3828385 bytes, checksum: 09861e5edb8eb07812e42699fd84af93 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-12-19 / When reflecting on a student's formation in the society of the digital age, there is a need to take advantage of the resources available to contribute to the teaching / learning processes inside and outside the classroom. Most young are increasingly in contact with mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. They use these tools to access as social networks and also to participate in games. The latter, according to research, are most in demand and exist in wide variety, show their problems and abilities of educational interest. The Ministry of Education, for example, since 2008 organizes a bank of educational objects that exploit human resources, but the majority focuses on the areas of Mathematics and Sciences. For a subject of Visual Arts, for example, there is none that explores its contents. Establishment of easy access, the game Dalí eX, with reference base in the studies on language and subjectivity, besides static education, teaching of Visual Arts and Visual Culture. Theme as reference the genre RPG - RPG Game, which game of interpretation of people, where it is possible to live a fictitious world. The artistic production of Salvador Dalí was selected to compose his narrative. / Ao refletir sobre a formação do estudante na sociedade da era digital, observa-se a necessidade de aproveitar os recursos por ela disponibilizados para contribuir com os processos de ensino/aprendizagem dentro e fora de sala de aula. A maioria desses jovens tem cada vez mais contato com os dispositivos de tecnologia móvel como celulares e tablets. Eles utilizam essas ferramentas cotidianamente para acessar as redes sociais e também para participarem de jogos. Esses últimos, segundo pesquisas, são os mais procurados e existem numa grande variedade, mas poucos deles exploram temáticas de interesse educacional. O Ministério da Educação, por exemplo, desde 2008 organiza um banco de objetos educacionais que exploram esses recursos tecnológicos, mas a maioria se concentra nas áreas de Matemática e Ciências. Para a disciplina de Artes Visuais, por exemplo, não há nenhum que explore seus conteúdos. Esta dissertação pretende contribuir nesse sentido, ao apresentar um aplicativo de fácil acesso, o jogo Dalí eX, com base referencial nos estudos sobre linguagem e subjetividade, além de educação estética, ensino de Artes Visuais e Cultura Visual. Ele tem como referência o gênero RPG – Role Playing Game, que em português significa jogo de interpretação de personagens, onde é possível vivenciar um mundo fictício. A produção artística de Salvador Dalí foi selecionada para compor sua narrativa.

Interactive application for teaching the topic of the Earth as a planet Abstract The thesis is focused on the creation of an interactive application for teaching the topic of the Earth as a planet at secondary schools. The theoretical part generally deals with digital technologies for teaching, educational applications and pedagogical-psychological aspects of the subject. The topic was defined and analyzed using curriculum documents, textbooks and school atlases. Based on the analysis, partial topics were selected and turned into an application that covers separate learning objects. 8 learning objects were created ("Distances and dimensions", "Earth's orbit", "Seasons", "Solar time", "Moon phases", "Solar and Lunar eclipses", "Orbiting around the barycenter", "Tidal phenomena") and 4 learning objects were taken ("Solar System", "Earth's shape - geoid", "Time zones", "Future eclipses"). Each learning object has been provided with its theoretical introduction and methodological questions and tasks. The final educational application will be available on the Internet as a web application, without the need for installation. Keywords: educational application, interactivity, teaching Geography, the Solar System, the Earth, the Moon

This diploma thesis is study of development of eductional application with game features. Theme of the aplication is developing of social skills. Introduction consists of determination of requirements on process of development and on application itself. The work follows with theoretical basis for particular aspects of developing and selling of application. From technical perspective the work contains detail informations about so called chatbot technologies, it's princips of functioning and evaluation of it's contemporary maturity level with regard to usability in my application. The work ends by concrete proposal of solutin of application based on theoretical findings.

<p> The proliferation of digital educational applications (apps) has revolutionized the pedagogical landscape for students and instructors, both within and beyond the confines of traditional classrooms. Educational apps offer a variety of features that can help students learn more effectively, including personalized instruction and real-time feedback. However, some studies have found that students may not be engaging with the apps regularly or for extended periods of time. This lack of engagement can limit the apps’ potential to improve student learning. Consequently, researchers have investigated methods to enhance students’ app engagement, including the use of digital nudges. Digital nudging is a strategy that proposes utilizing small, non-intrusive cues that capitalize on individuals’ cognitive biases to influence their behavior.</p> <p><br></p> <p>This dissertation makes a significant contribution to ongoing efforts by examining the effectiveness of nudge-based digital interventions in improving students’ engagement with the CourseMIRROR educational app. CourseMIRROR is an educational mobile app that prompts students to reflect on the interesting and confusing aspects of lectures throughout a semester. The CourseMIRROR app uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to 1) scaffold the students while generating reflections and 2) summarize the students’ submitted reflections. This study focuses on designing digital nudges to improve students’ cognitive and behavioral engagement with specific features of the app that are crucial to achieving its primary purposes. These primary purposes include 1) facilitating students to submit reflections, 2) enabling students to view the reflection summary interface, and 3) scaffolding students to write in-depth and comprehensive reflections. The study consists of three experiments investigating the effectiveness of these digital nudges for improving student engagement with the CourseMIRROR app. </p> <p><br></p> <p>For this dissertation, I conducted three experiments by implementing the CourseMIRROR app in multiple sections of a first-year engineering course at Purdue University over a semester. <em><strong>Experiment 1</strong></em> investigated the impact of social comparison nudge and neutral reminder nudge to increase students’ reflection submissions by using the app. Students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: social comparison nudge, neutral reminder nudge, or baseline (no nudge). The social comparison nudge involved reminding and showing peers’ behavior through their reflection submissions, and the neutral reminder nudge involved sending automated reminders to students to submit their reflections. The results indicated that social comparison and neutral reminder nudges were effective in increasing reflection submissions compared to the baseline condition. However, the social comparison nudge was slightly more effective in improving the number of reflection submissions than the neutral reminder nudge. Also, the nudge interventions became effective in increasing the reflection submissions by refocusing the students’ attention as time progressed in the semester. </p> <p><br></p> <p><em><strong>Experiment 2</strong></em> explored the impact of summary reminder nudges and interface nudges to increase students’ visits to the reflection summary interface in the app. Students were randomly assigned to summary reminder nudge, interface nudge, or baseline conditions. The summary reminder nudge involved reminding students to visit the reflection summary interface in the app. The interface nudge involved making the summary available lecture more prominent to draw students’ attention to the reflection summary interface. The result revealed that summary reminder and interface nudges did not significantly improve the number of students’ visits to the reflection summary interface. Also, for all conditions, students’ visits to reflection summary interface decreased over time as time progressed. </p> <p><br></p> <p><em><strong>Experiment 3</strong></em> examined the impact of scaffolding and throttling mindless nudges on promoting more comprehensive and lengthier reflection submissions. Students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: scaffolding nudge, throttling mindless nudge, or baseline. The scaffolding nudge involved providing students with real-time feedback to guide their reflection writing, while the throttling mindless nudge involved giving a pause to re-think if they want to move forward to the next question or revise their reflection in the application. Overall, the results showed that scaffolding and throttling mindless nudges effectively promoted more comprehensive and lengthier reflection submissions over the semester and within each time. However, students’ reflections in all conditions remained either consistent or decreased in reflection text length and specificity score over time in a semester.  </p> <p><br></p> <p>The study’s results indicate that digital nudges can effectively enhance students’ engagement with educational applications, especially in reflection activities using CourseMIRROR. These findings provide valuable insights into designing and implementing digital nudges in educational apps and evaluating their impact on student engagement. Future research should build on these results to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the potential of digital nudges to support student engagement in educational technology settings.</p>

The subject of the thesis is designing and implementing web application, which visualizes the impacts of alternative land use in a model village and its surroundings, pointing out possible advantages, disadvantages and risks of different land uses. The user is able to place buildings on the map and choose between different approaches to agriculture, forestry, water managment etc. The application visualizes the impact of users decisions in response.

Recent advancements in machine learning have started to put their mark on educational technology. Technology is evolving fast and, as people adopt it, schools and universities must also keep up (nearly 70% of primary and secondary schools in the UK are now using tablets for various purposes). As these numbers are likely going to follow the same increasing trend, it is imperative for schools to adapt and benefit from the advantages offered by technology: real-time processing of data, availability of different resources through connectivity, efficiency, and many others. To this end, this work contributes to the growth of educational technology by developing several algorithms and models that are meant to ease several tasks for the instructors, engage students in deep discussions and ultimately, increase their learning gains. First, a novel, fine-grained knowledge representation is introduced that splits phrases into their constituent propositions that are both meaningful and minimal. An automated extraction algorithm of the propositions is also introduced. Compared with other fine-grained representations, the extraction model does not require any human labor after it is trained, while the results show considerable improvement over two meaningful baselines. Second, a proposition alignment model is created that relies on even finer-grained units of text while also outperforming several alternative systems. Third, a detailed machine learning based analysis of students' unrestricted natural language responses to questions asked in classrooms is made by leveraging the proposition extraction algorithm to make computational predictions of textual assessment. Two computational approaches are introduced that use and compare manually engineered machine learning features with word embeddings input into a two-hidden layers neural network. Both methods achieve notable improvements over two alternative approaches, a recent short answer grading system and DiSAN – a recent, pre-trained, light-weight neural network that obtained state-of-the-art performance on multiple NLP tasks and corpora. Fourth, a clustering algorithm is introduced in order to bring structure to the feedback offered to instructors in classrooms. The algorithm organizes student responses based on three important aspects: propositional importance classifications, computational textual understanding of student understanding and algorithm similarity metrics between student responses. Moreover, a dynamic cluster selection algorithm is designed to decide which are the best groups of responses resulting from the cluster hierarchy. The algorithm achieves a performance that is 86.3% of the performance achieved by humans on the same task and dataset. Fifth, a deep neural network is built to predict, for each cluster, an engagement response that is meant to help generate insightful classroom discussion. This is the first ever computational model to predict how engaging student responses will be in classroom discussion. Its performance reaches 86.8% of the performance obtained by humans on the same task and dataset. Moreover, I also demonstrate the effectiveness of a dynamic algorithm that can self-improve with minimal help from the teachers, in order to reduce its relative error by up to 32%.

La educación es uno de los rubros más importantes a nivel sectorial, es uno de los pilares principales en toda sociedad para el crecimiento y el avance de un país. Un país con mayores oportunidades de educación como promoción de esta será un país mucho más competitivo a nivel sectorial y global. La educación por años en el Perú ha sido más que un derecho un privilegio que por años se ha evidenciado en la educación pública como privada. En la actualidad en el Perú, existen cientos de comunidades que no cuentan con los medios necesarios para poder brindar clases adecuadas a los niños tanto de nivel primario como secundaria. Todo ello se vio afectado una vez llegada la pandemia que paro los procesos educativos y significo todo un reto poder implementar la educación online. Un reto que poco a poco escuelas han venido realizando esfuerzos por mejorar la calidad de enseñanza, tratando de no perder la figura real que poco a poco se va desvaneciendo. La realidad de la educación actual no es muy alentadora, el nivel de rendimiento de miles de estudiantes bajo significativamente con las clases virtuales no es de sorpresa ya que la poca inversión en el sector hace que se compliquen mucho más las decisiones del ministerio de educación. La educación ahora es un desafío y muchos escolares no terminan de entender sus clases, no mejoran su rendimiento y es muy bajo el nivel de satisfacción. Bajo este contexto, nuestra visión es de traer una nueva vista de la educación online, una mejorada donde la educación sea la protagonista. Nuestro proyecto busca marcar un hito a nivel nacional, uniendo estudiantes con otros estudiantes. Mediante nuestro proyecto se buscará brindar clases de refuerzo totalmente personalizadas a niños de primaria bajo la enseñanza de jóvenes universitarios capacitados en las diversas materias. Mediante este modelo de negocio ambas partes ganas y consigo también ganan nuevas oportunidades como experiencias de vida. Queremos posicionarnos como una propuesta de educación de calidad y excelencia. Nuestra iniciativa resultara con niños con un mejor aprovechamiento escolar, sino también con jóvenes que lideran una iniciativa en vías de construir un país con un mejor nivel de educación. Iniciativa que se busca lograr grandes resultados a largo plazo para continuar con nuestra propuesta a nivel nacional como también en nuestra próxima expansión. / Education is one of the most key areas at the sectoral level; it is one of the main pillars in any society for the growth and progress of a country. A country with greater opportunities for education as a promotion of this will be a much more competitive country at a sectorial and global level. For years, education in Peru has been more than a right, it has been a privilege that for years has been evidenced in both public and private education. Currently in Peru, there are hundreds of communities that do not have the necessary means to provide adequate classes to children at both primary and secondary level. All this was affected by the pandemic that stopped the educational processes and meant a challenge to implement online education. A challenge that little by little schools have been making efforts to improve the quality of teaching, trying not to lose the real figure that is gradually fading. The reality of the current education is not very encouraging, the level of performance of thousands of students significantly lower with virtual classes is not surprising since the low investment in the sector makes the decisions of the Ministry of Education much more complicated. Education is now a challenge and many schoolchildren do not understand their classes, do not improve their performance and the level of satisfaction is exceptionally low. Under this context, our vision is to bring a new view of online education, an improved one where education is the protagonist. Our project seeks to mark a milestone at a national level, uniting students with other students. Through our project we will seek to provide fully customized tutoring to elementary school children under the teaching of young university students trained in various subjects. Through this business model both parties win and gain new opportunities as life experiences. We want to position ourselves as a proposal for quality education and excellence. Our initiative will result in children with a better school performance, but also with young people who lead an initiative to build a country with a better level of education. This initiative seeks to achieve impressive results in the long term to continue with our proposal at a national level as well as in our next expansion. / Trabajo de investigación

This thesis focuses on the use of information technologies (ICT) in the development of children from families with low socio-economic background, specifically on the use of the Smart application. The theoretical part of the thesis discusses the specificity of the pre-school age from the perspectives of developmental psychology and social pedagogy. These disciplines are used to define the optimal characteristics and competencies necessary for school readiness. Next, specific aspects of school readiness and factors influencing this readiness are discussed. Relatedly, the specificities of upbringing in socially disadvantaged families and their impacts on child development are explored. In the following chapter, information technologies and their effects on child development are thoroughly discussed. The application Smart is then introduced, which is a specific tool designed to support the development of school readiness. The Smart application is then used in the empirical part of the thesis. Finally, at the end of the theoretical part, the diagnostic instrument Isophi is described. This instrument was used to evaluate the children participating in my research. The empirical part of the thesis describes a multiple case study of the development of children from families with low socio-economic...