Related papers: Online Administration of Research-Based Assessment…

In recommender systems (RecSys) and real-time bidding (RTB) for online advertisements, we often try to optimize sequential decision making using bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. In these applications, offline reinforcement…

Nonresponse bias is a widely prevalent problem for data on education. We develop a ten-step exemplar to guide nonresponse bias analysis (NRBA) in cross-sectional studies and apply these steps to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study,…

Research shows that expert-like approaches to problem-solving can be promoted by encouraging students to explicate their thought processes and follow a prescribed problem-solving strategy. Since grading communicates instructors'…

Physics instructors need support to successfully adopt and adapt evidence-based active engagement (EBAE) approaches because improving teaching and learning is a process and support is needed to ensure that they do not get disheartened if a…

Acquiring the mathematical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills required in university-level physics courses is hard work, and the average student often lacks the knowledge and study skills they need to succeed in the introductory…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy using only pre-collected and fixed data. Although avoiding the time-consuming online interactions in RL, it poses challenges for out-of-distribution (OOD) state actions and often…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Building upon prior research that highlighted the need for standardizing environments for building control research, and inspired by recently introduced challenges for real life reinforcement learning control, here we propose a…

Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…

At Arizona State University we have built the first and only fully online Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, with a complete curriculum, including labs. The upper division Advanced Lab courses present a special challenge for online…

Modern decision-making systems, from robots to web recommendation engines, are expected to adapt: to user preferences, changing circumstances or even new tasks. Yet, it is still uncommon to deploy a dynamically learning agent (rather than a…

As educational technology evolves, the potential of Pedagogical Agents (PAs) in supporting education is extensively explored. Typically, research on PAs has primarily focused on computer-based learning environments, but their use in…

Readability assessment is the task of evaluating the reading difficulty of a given piece of text. Although research on computational approaches to readability assessment is now two decades old, there is not much work on synthesizing this…

The application of social network analysis (SNA) has recently grown prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education research. Research on classroom networks has led to greater understandings of student persistence…

Personalization and active learning are key aspects to successful learning. These aspects are important to address in intelligent educational applications, as they help systems to adapt and close the gap between students with varying…

In recent years, the role of big data analytics has exponentially grown and is now slowly making its way into the education industry. Several attempts are being made in this sphere in order to improve the quality of education being provided…

Project Based Learning (PBL), recognized as an active learning strategy, has been linked to self efficacy of student in prior studies, including those within Physics Education Research. Meanwhile, technological advancements have…

Multiple-choice multiple-response (MCMR) items (i.e., multiple-choice questions for which more than one response may be selected) can be a valuable tool for assessment. Like traditional multiple-choice single-response questions, they are…

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an appealing formalism for learning control policies from experience. However, the classic active formulation of RL necessitates a lengthy active exploration process for each behavior, making it…