Motivated by both classroom needs and learning science questions, we developed two computer-based systems to help students learn the English article system (a, an, the, null). The first system, a menu-based task, mimics cloze activities found in many ESL textbooks. The second, a controlled-editing task, gives students practice with both detecting errors and producing the correct response. Resul...

The paper introduces a new research strategy for the investigation of human translation behavior. While conventional cognitive research methods make use of think aloud protocols (TAP), we introduce and investigate UserActivity Data (UAD). UAD consists of the translator’s recorded keystroke and eye-movement behavior, which makes it possible to replay a translation session and to register the sub...

Pervasive and ubiquitous computing has come a long way in recent years, and our technologies and experimental prototypes are slowly moving out of the lab and into people’s everyday lives. In this talk I will provide an overview of such research conducted by my team over the past years, and outline the main challenges that we face in the future, particularly in terms of making our technology acc...

COLLECT-UML is an intelligent tutoring system that teaches Object-Oriented design using Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML is one of the most popular techniques used in the design and development of Object-Oriented systems nowadays. The Constraint-Based Modelling (CBM) has been used successfully in several systems and they have proved to be extremely effective in evaluations performed in rea...

This paper introduces the LetsRead Corpus of European Portuguese read speech from 6 to 10 years old children. The motivation for the creation of this corpus stems from the inexistence of databases with recordings of reading tasks of Portuguese children with different performance levels and including all the common reading aloud disfluencies. It is also essential to develop techniques to fulfill...

Systems driven out of equilibrium can often exhibit behaviour not seen in systems in thermal equilibriumfor example phase transitions in one-dimensional systems. In this talk I will review several ‘condensation’ transitions that occur when a conserved quantity is driven through the system. Although the condensation is spatial, i.e. a finite fraction of the conserved quantity condenses into a sm...

Policy problems like “What should we do about global warming?” are ill-defined in large part because we do not agree on a system to represent them the way we agree Algebra problems should be represented by equations. As a first step toward building a policy deliberation tutor, we investigated: (a) whether causal diagrams help students learn to evaluate policy options, (b) whether constructing d...

This paper offers a detailed text analysis of the written feedback given by two teachers to ESL students over a complete proficiency course. We consider this feedback in terms of its functions as praise, criticism, and suggestions. Praise was the most frequently employed function in the feedback of these two teachers, but this was often used to soften criticisms and suggestions rather than simp...

Constructive interaction provides natural thinking-aloud as test subjects collaborate to solve tasks. Since children may face difficulties in following instructions for a standard think-aloud test, constructive interaction has been suggested as evaluation method when conducting usability testing with children. However, the relationship between thinkaloud and constructive interaction is still po...