ReaderBench goes Online: A Comprehension-Centered Framework for Educational Purposes

In this paper we introduce the online version of our ReaderBench framework, which includes multi-lingual comprehension-centered web services designed to address a wide range of individual and collaborative learning scenarios, as follows. First, students can be engaged in reading a course material, then eliciting their understanding of it; the reading strategies component provides an in-depth perspective of comprehension processes. Second, students can write an essay or a summary; the automated essay grading component provides them access to more than 200 textual complexity indices covering lexical, syntax, semantics and discourse structure measurements. Third, students can start discussing in a chat or a forum; the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) component provides indepth conversation analysis in terms of evaluating each member’s involvement in the CSCL environments. Eventually, the sentiment analysis, as well as the semantic models and topic mining components enable a clearer perspective in terms of learner’s points of view and of underlying interests.

Predicting Student Performance and Differences in Learning Styles based on Textual Complexity Indices applied on Blog and Microblog Posts

Social media tools are increasingly popular in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and the analysis of students' contributions on these tools is an emerging research direction. Previous studies have mainly focused on examining quantitative behavior indicators on social media tools. In contrast, the approach proposed in this paper relies on the actual content analysis of each student's contributions in a learning environment. More specifically, in this study, textual complexity analysis is applied to investigate how student's writing style on social media tools can be used to predict their academic performance and their learning style. Multiple textual complexity indices are used for analyzing the blog and microblog posts of 27 students engaged in a project-based learning activity. The preliminary results of this pilot study are encouraging, with several indexes predictive of student grades and/or learning styles.

Education and self-regulation of learning for gifted pupils: Systemic design and development.

Gifted pupils differ from their age-mates with respect to development potential, actual competencies, self-regulatory capabilities, and learning styles in one or more domains of competence. The question is how to design and develop education that fits and further supports such characteristics and competencies of gifted pupils. Analysis of various types of educational interventions for gifted pupils reflects positive cognitive or intellectual effects and differentiated social comparison or group-related effects on these pupils. Systemic preventive combination of such interventions could make these more effective and sustainable. The systemic design is characterised by three conditional dimensions: differentiation of learning materials and procedures, integration by and use of ICT support, and strategies to improve development and learning. The relationships to diagnostic, instructional, managerial, and systemic learning aspects are expressed in guidelines to develop or transform education. The guidelines imply the facilitation of learning arrangements that provide flexible self-regulation for gifted pupils. A three-year pilot in Dutch nursery and primary school is conducted to develop and implement the design in collaboration with teachers. The results constitute prototypes of structured competence domains and supportive software. These support the screening of entry characteristics of all four-year old pupils and assignment of adequate play and learning processes and activities throughout the school career. Gifted and other pupils are supported to work at their actual achievement or competency levels since their start in nursery school, in self-regulated learning arrangements either in or out of class. Each pupil can choose other pupils to collaborate with in small groups, at self-chosen tasks or activities, while being coached by the teacher. Formative evaluation of the school development process shows that the systemic prevention guidelines seem to improve learning and social progress of gifted pupils, including their self-regulation. Further development and implementation steps are discussed.