The present study examined whether social motivational influence from working with a Teachable Agent (TA) might transfer from the formative learning phase to a summative test situation. Forty-nine students (9-10 years old) performed a digital pretest of math skills, then played a TA-based educational math game in school over a period of seven weeks. Thereafter, the students were divided into tw...

The Cognitive Science Research group at ETS conducts research and development at the forefront of educational assessment, using cognitive theory in the design of assessments, building cognitive models to guide interpretation of test-takers’ performance, and researching cognitive issues in the context of assessment. Moving beyond traditional (e.g., multiple-choice) tests, the group investigates ...

We argue (1) that the domains of externally mandated tests should be transparent to teachers, (2) that test maps can be used to communicate with teachers, and (3) that the most effective test maps express domains in terms of combinations of what students know and can do. We propose a device called a heuristic as the lowest level of specificity in a test map, and criteria to achieve a balance be...

Real-time strategy games share many aspects with real situations in domains such as battle planning, air traffic control, and emergency response team management which makes them appealing test-beds for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. End user annotations could help to provide supplemental information for learning algorithms, especially when training data is sparse. This paper...