More Like this

1. Improving Automated Scoring of Student Open Responses in Mathematics

   Baral, Sami; Botelho, Anthony; Erickson, John; Benachamardi, Priyanka; Heffernan, Neil (June 2021, Educational Data Mining EDM 2021)

   Open-ended questions in mathematics are commonly used by teachers to monitor and assess students’ deeper conceptual understanding of content. Student answers to these types of questions often exhibit a combination of language, drawn diagrams and tables, and mathematical formulas and expressions that supply teachers with insight into the processes and strategies adopted by students in formulating their responses. While these student responses help to inform teachers on their students’ progress and understanding, the amount of variation in these responses can make it difficult and time-consuming for teachers to manually read, assess, and provide feedback to student work. For this reason, there has been a growing body of research in developing AI-powered tools to support teachers in this task. This work seeks to build upon this prior research by introducing a model that is designed to help automate the assessment of student responses to open-ended questions in mathematics through sentence-level semantic representations. We find that this model outperforms previously published benchmarks across three different metrics. With this model, we conduct an error analysis to examine characteristics of student responses that may be considered to further improve the method. 

   more » « less
2. Improving Automated Scoring of Student Open Responses in Mathematics

   Baral, Sami; Botelho, Anthony; Heffernan, Neil T. (January 2021, International Conference on Educational Data Mining)

   null (Ed.)

   Open-ended questions in mathematics are commonly used by teachers to monitor and assess students’ deeper conceptual understanding of content. Student answers to these types of questions often exhibit a combination of language, drawn diagrams and tables, and mathematical formulas and expressions that supply teachers with insight into the processes and strategies adopted by students in formulating their responses. While these student responses help to inform teachers on their students’ progress and understanding, the amount of variation in these responses can make it difficult and time-consuming for teachers to manually read, assess, and provide feedback to student work. For this reason, there has been a growing body of research in developing AI-powered tools to support teachers in this task. This work seeks to build upon this prior research by introducing a model that is designed to help automate the assessment of student responses to open-ended questions in mathematics through sentence-level semantic representations. We find that this model outperforms previouslypublished benchmarks across three different metrics. With this model, we conduct an error analysis to examine characteristics of student responses that may be considered to further improve the method. 

   more » « less
3. Improving Automated Scoring of Student Open Responses in Mathematics.

   Baral, S.; Botelho, A.; Erickson, J.A.; Benachamardi, P.; Heffernan, N. (January 2021, Educational Data Mining)

   null (Ed.)

   Open-ended questions in mathematics are commonly used by teachers to monitor and assess students’ deeper conceptual understanding of content. Student answers to these types of questions often exhibit a combination of language, drawn diagrams and tables, and mathematical formulas and expressions that supply teachers with insight into the processes and strategies adopted by students in formulating their responses. While these student responses help to inform teachers on their students’ progress and understanding, the amount of variation in these responses can make it difficult and time-consuming for teachers to manually read, assess, and provide feedback to student work. For this reason, there has been a growing body of research in developing AI-powered tools to support teachers in this task. This work seeks to build upon this prior research by introducing a model that is designed to help automate the assessment of student responses to open-ended questions in mathematics through sentence-level semantic representations. We find that this model outperforms previously published benchmarks across three different metrics. With this model, we conduct an error analysis to examine characteristics of student responses that may be considered to further improve the method. 

   more » « less
4. Improving Automated Scoring of Student Open Responses in Mathematics

   Baral, Sami; Botelho, Anthony F; Erickson, John A; Benachamardi, Priyanka; Heffernan, Neil T. (June 2021, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Educational Data Mining)

   Open-ended questions in mathematics are commonly used by teachers to monitor and assess students’ deeper concep- tual understanding of content. Student answers to these types of questions often exhibit a combination of language, drawn diagrams and tables, and mathematical formulas and expressions that supply teachers with insight into the pro- cesses and strategies adopted by students in formulating their responses. While these student responses help to in- form teachers on their students’ progress and understand- ing, the amount of variation in these responses can make it difficult and time-consuming for teachers to manually read, assess, and provide feedback to student work. For this rea- son, there has been a growing body of research in devel- oping AI-powered tools to support teachers in this task. This work seeks to build upon this prior research by in- troducing a model that is designed to help automate the assessment of student responses to open-ended questions in mathematics through sentence-level semantic represen- tations. We find that this model outperforms previously- published benchmarks across three different metrics. With this model, we conduct an error analysis to examine char- acteristics of student responses that may be considered to further improve the method. 

   more » « less
5. Improving Automated Assessment and Feedback for Student Open-responses in Mathematics

   Baral, Sami (July 2022, Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, International Educational Data Mining Society)

   Advancements in online learning platforms have revolutionized education in multiple different ways, transforming the learning experiences and instructional practices. The development of natural language processing and machine learning methods have helped understand and process student languages, comprehend their learning state, and build automated supports for teachers. With this, there has been a growing body of research in developing automated methods to assess students’ work both in mathematical and nonmathematical domains. These automated methods address questions of two categories; closed-ended (with limited correct answers) and open-ended (are often subjective and have multiple correct answers), where open-ended questions are mostly used by teachers to learn about their student’s understanding of a particular concept. Manually assessing and providing feedback to these open-ended questions is often arduous and time-consuming for teachers. For this reason, there have been several works to understand student responses to these open-ended questions to automate the assessment and provide constructive feedback to students. In this research, we seek to improve such a prior method for assessment and feedback suggestions for student open-ended works in mathematics. For this, we present an error analysis of the prior method ”SBERT-Canberra” for auto-scoring, explore various factors that contribute to the error of the method, and propose solutions to improve upon the method by addressing these error factors. We further intend to expand this approach by improving feedback suggestions for teachers to give to their students’ open-ended work. 

   more » « less