This study investigates how certain teacher characteristics—specifically, math anxiety and confidence in teaching mathematics—and school-context features are associated with teachers’ behavioral engagement patterns in an online teacher professional learning platform. To this end, we applied frequent sequential pattern mining to elementary teachers’ log data collected from an online professional learning platform, the Virtual Learning Community (VLC), and linked it with survey data. Results indicate that teachers with higher levels of math anxiety were significantly more likely to remain within a single section of VLC rather than navigate across multiple sections (b = -0.764, p <.001). Additionally, this exploratory engagement was positively associated with teachers’ self-reported instructional practices (b = 0.743, p <.001). This finding indicates that teachers who navigated across multiple sections of VLC were more likely to perceive improvements in their instructional practice. Our research contributes to empirical evidence on how individual differences contribute to diverse patterns of participation in online professional learning, and it discusses practical implications that offer insights for designing teacher-specific support strategies in these environments.

Students struggle with accurately assessing their own performance, especially given little training to do so.We propose an AI-powered training tool to help students improve "metacognitive calibration, " or the ability to accurately predict their own learning, potentially enhancing learning outcomes by enabling students' use of metacognitioninformed learning behaviors.We present results from a randomized controlled trial (N = 133) assessing the effectiveness of the tool in a college-level computer-based learning environment.The AIdriven tool significantly improved learning gains compared to the control group by 8.9% (t = -2.384,p = .019),and this effect was significantly mediated by learning behaviors.Overconfident students who received the intervention showed significantly greater metacognitive calibration improvement than the control group by 4.1% (t = 2.001, p = .049).These insights highlight the value of AIpowered metacognitive calibration training and the importance of promoting specific metacognition-informed learning behaviors in computer-based learning.

Impact assessment is an evolving area of research that aims at measuring and predicting the potential effects of projects or programs. Measuring the impact of scientific research is a vibrant subdomain, closely intertwined with impact assessment. A recurring obstacle pertains to the absence of an efficient framework which can facilitate the analysis of lengthy reports and text labeling. To address this issue, we propose a framework for automatically assessing the impact of scientific research projects by identifying pertinent sections in project reports that indicate the potential impacts. We leverage a mixed-method approach, combining manual annotations with supervised machine learning, to extract these passages from project reports. We experiment with different machine learning algorithms, including traditional statistical models as well as pre-trained transformer language models. Our experiments show that our proposed method achieves accuracy scores up to 0.81, and that our method is generalizable to scientific research from different domains and different languages.

Measuring algorithmic bias in machine learning has historically focused on statistical inequalities pertaining to specific groups. However, the most common metrics (i.e., those focused on individual- or group-conditioned error rates) are not currently well-suited to educational settings because they assume that each individual observation is independent from the others. This is not statistically appropriate when studying certain common educational outcomes, because such metrics cannot account for the relationship between students in classrooms or multiple observations per student across an academic year. In this paper, we present novel adaptations of algorithmic bias measurements for regression for both independent and nested data structures. Using hierarchical linear models, we rigorously measure algorithmic bias in a machine learning model of the relationship between student engagement in an intelligent tutoring system and year-end standardized test scores. We conclude that classroom-level influences had a small but significant effect on models. Examining significance with hierarchical linear models helps determine which inequalities in educational settings might be explained by small sample sizes rather than systematic differences.