Related papers: Getting Explicit Instruction Right
In AI-rich higher education, polished written mathematics has become easier to produce than trustworthy evidence of understanding. This article develops a human-scale methodology for service mathematics, with informatics as its main running…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in learning from explanations in prompts, but there has been limited understanding of exactly how these explanations function or why they are effective. This work aims to…
Intelligent tutors have proven to be effective in K-12 education, though their impact on adult learners -- especially as a supplementary resource -- remains underexplored. Understanding how adults voluntarily engage with educational…
We propose a new strategy to identify the impact of class rank, exploiting a "visible" primary school rank from teachers' exam grades, and an "invisible" rank from unreported standardized test scores. Leveraging a unique panel dataset on…
Feedback has a powerful influence on learning, but it is also expensive to provide. In large classes, it may even be impossible for instructors to provide individualized feedback. Peer assessment has received attention lately as a way of…
Academic performance depends on a multivariable nexus of socio-academic and financial factors. This study investigates these influences to develop effective strategies for optimizing students' CGPA. To achieve this, we reviewed various…
We have analyzed the impact of taking an associated lab course on the scores on final exam questions in two large introductory physics courses. Approximately a third of the students who completed each course also took an accompanying…
Students express a wide range of preferences for learning environments. We are trying to measure the manifestation of learning styles in various learning environments. In particular, we are interested in performance in an environment that…
In this study, I explored the impact of Generative AI on learning efficacy in academic reading materials using experimental methods. College-educated participants engaged in three cycles of reading and writing tasks. After each cycle, they…
Evaluating the performance of students in higher education is essential for gauging the effectiveness of teaching methods and achieving greater equality of opportunities for all. In this study, we investigate the correlation between two…
"Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. The recitation classes in an introductory physics class (~200…
Dropout is a widely-used regularization technique, often required to obtain state-of-the-art for a number of architectures. This work demonstrates that dropout introduces two distinct but entangled regularization effects: an explicit effect…
U.S. state education agencies mark schools displaying achievement gaps between demographic subgroups as needing improvement. Some schools may have few students in these subgroups, such that average end-of-year test scores only noisily…
Reliance on stereotypes is a persistent feature of human decision-making and has been extensively documented in educational settings, where it can shape students' confidence, performance, and long-term human capital accumulation. While…
The objective of our study is to ascertain the present learning behaviors, driving forces, and assessment techniques as perceived by first-year students, and to examine them through the lens of the most recent developments (pandemic, shift…
Learning to flexibly follow task instructions in dynamic environments poses interesting challenges for reinforcement learning agents. We focus here on the problem of learning control flow that deviates from a strict step-by-step execution…
Tailoring the presentation of information to the needs of individual students leads to massive gains in student outcomes~\cite{bloom19842}. This finding is likely due to the fact that different students learn differently, perhaps as a…
Backdoor attacks inject poisoning samples during training, with the goal of forcing a machine learning model to output an attacker-chosen class when presented a specific trigger at test time. Although backdoor attacks have been demonstrated…
Students at all levels of education are increasingly relying on generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to complete assignments and achieve higher exam scores. However, it remains unclear how this reliance affects their motivation,…
While many methods purport to explain predictions by highlighting salient features, what aims these explanations serve and how they ought to be evaluated often go unstated. In this work, we introduce a framework to quantify the value of…