Related papers: Probing Student Understanding With Alternative Que…
Query Understanding concerns about inferring the precise intent of search by the user with his formulated query, which is challenging because the queries are often very short and ambiguous. The report discusses the various kind of queries…
Automated scoring engines are increasingly being used to score the free-form text responses that students give to questions. Such engines are not designed to appropriately deal with responses that a human reader would find alarming such as…
Many physics instructors aim to support student sensemaking in their classrooms. However, this can be challenging since instances of sensemaking tend to be short-lived, with students often defaulting to approaches based on answer-making or…
Prequestioning is an instructional strategy that involves taking practice tests on to-be-learned information followed by studying the correct answers. Despite promising results in laboratory studies, it has rarely been examined in authentic…
Students in physics laboratory courses, particularly at the upper division, are often expected to engage in troubleshooting. Although there are numerous ways in which students may proceed when diagnosing a problem, not all approaches are…
A large-scale conversational agent can suffer from understanding user utterances with various ambiguities such as ASR ambiguity, intent ambiguity, and hypothesis ambiguity. When ambiguities are detected, the agent should engage in a…
In this paper we analyze two question answering tasks : the TREC-8 question answering task and a set of reading comprehension exams. First, we show that Q/A systems perform better when there are multiple answer opportunities per question.…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
Authentic research as a method of teaching science is gaining popularity in high schools and colleges. To make this research experience most efficient, students need adequate preparation in traditional science courses. Existing materials…
Keeping students engaged with the course content outside the classroom is a challenging task. Since learning during undergraduate years occurs not only as student engagement in class, but also during out of class activities, we need to…
The multi-answer phenomenon, where a question may have multiple answers scattered in the document, can be well handled by humans but is challenging enough for machine reading comprehension (MRC) systems. Despite recent progress in…
Many problems can be solved in two ways: either by adapting an existing solution, or by exchanging it for a new one. To investigate under what conditions people consider new solutions, we traced their information acquisition processes in a…
Coping with ambiguous questions has been a perennial problem in real-world dialogue systems. Although clarification by asking questions is a common form of human interaction, it is hard to define appropriate questions to elicit more…
Although visualization tools are widely available and accessible, not everyone knows the best practices and guidelines for creating accurate and honest visual representations of data. Numerous books and articles have been written to expose…
Conceptual inventory surveys are routinely used in education research to identify student learning needs and assess instructional practices. Students might not fully engage with these instruments because of the low stakes attached to them.…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly…
There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by…
Conventional methods for query autocompletion aim to predict which completed query a user will select from a list. A shortcoming of this approach is that users often do not know which query will provide the best retrieval performance on the…
Teaching scientific concepts is essential but challenging, and analogies help students connect new concepts to familiar ideas. Advancements in large language models (LLMs) enable generating analogies, yet their effectiveness in education…
Multiple-choice reading and listening comprehension tests are an important part of language assessment. Content creators for standard educational tests need to carefully curate questions that assess the comprehension abilities of candidates…