Related papers: Getting Explicit Instruction Right
Given the profound and uncritiqued changes that have been implemented in Aotearoa New Zealand education since the 1990s, this paper provides a critical commentary on the characterising features of the New Zealand mathematics' curriculum in…
The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students' tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes…
Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic…
Demonstration learning aims to guide the prompt prediction via providing answered demonstrations in the few shot settings. Despite achieving promising results, existing work only concatenates the answered examples as demonstrations to the…
School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of…
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…
There has been a growing realisation that school science curricula do not adequately reflect the revolutionary changes in our scientific understanding of the 20th century. This discrepancy between current school education and our modern…
We study the effects of counterfactual teacher-to-classroom assignments on average student achievement in elementary and middle schools in the US. We use the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) experiment to semiparametrically identify the…
Curriculum learning (CL), motivated by the intuition that learning in increasing order of difficulty should ease generalization, is commonly adopted both in pre-training and post-training of large language models (LLMs). The intuition of CL…
Contribution: A flipped classroom approach to teaching empirical software engineering increases student learning by providing more time for active learning in class. Background: There is a need for longitudinal studies of the flipped…
Knowledge distillation leverages a teacher model to improve the training of a student model. A persistent challenge is that a better teacher does not always yield a better student, to which a common mitigation is to use additional…
Evaluating the quality of explanations in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is to this day a challenging problem, with ongoing debate in the research community. While some advocate for establishing standardized offline metrics,…
This study examines how user-provided suggestions affect Large Language Models (LLMs) in a simulated educational context, where sycophancy poses significant risks. Testing five different LLMs from the OpenAI GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 model classes…
Responsive teaching, in which teachers adapt instruction based on close attention to the substance of students' ideas, is typically characterized along two dimensions: the level of detail at which teachers attend and respond to students'…
Assessments such as standardized tests and teacher evaluations of students' classroom participation are central elements of most educational systems. Assessments inform the student, parent, teacher, and school about the student learning…
If students have a broad spectrum of study skills, learning will likely be positively affected, since they can adapt the way they learn in different situations. Such study skills can be learned in for example learning-to-learn courses.…
The evolution of science education is a dynamic process driven by advances in pedagogy, technology, and especially, our understanding of how students learn. Educators are exploring innovative teaching and learning methodologies such as…
Physics faculty consider the photoelectric effect important, but many erroneously believe it is easy for students to understand. We have developed curriculum on this topic including an interactive computer simulation, interactive lectures…
Conventional research on educational effects typically either employs a "years of schooling" measure of education, or dichotomizes attainment as a point-in-time treatment. Yet, such a conceptualization of education is misaligned with the…
Instruction tuning commonly means finetuning a language model on instruction-response pairs. We discover two forms of adaptation (tuning) that are deficient compared to instruction tuning, yet still yield instruction following; we call this…