Papers for
learning management system developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Classroom polls show bias and limited student skill separation
An Audit of Measurement Quality and Answer Bias in a Large Classroom-Poll Corpus
Abstract: Real-time classroom polls are widely used and increasingly generated with automated assistance, yet the questions themselves are rarely evaluated as measurements. We audit a large corpus of authentic classroom polls, 604 items across 47 sessions answered 340,668 times by 2,807 learners, as a measurement instrument. For the 539 items whose correct answer could be established and verified from the lecture transcript, we place every item and every student on a common scale using item response theory and analyse the answer structure of the True/False items. Two findings emerge. First, the polls form a coherent but easy scale of moderate precision (marginal reliability about 0.60), on which roughly a quarter of items barely separate stronger from weaker students. Second, students show a robust tendency to answer True, present at the individual level (77% of students lean True), which meets a milder tendency for items to be keyed False; as a result answer direction predicts difficulty, False-keyed items being about thirteen points harder, and the effect survives controls for item content and for selective answering. Both findings rest on signals a polling system already records, so the same checks can be run as items are generated, before they reach students.
Business analytics instructors generate flexible synthetic datasets with ai
DataCanvas-EDU: An Agentic Framework for Instructor-Guided Synthetic Data Generation in Business Analytics Education
Abstract: Business analytics education requires diverse datasets to support different learning objectives, student backgrounds, and analytical tasks. Real-world data can be difficult to obtain and offer limited flexibility for adapting a case to a particular course. Even when suitable data are available, instructors must investigate the patterns, verify the results, and prepare assignments and reference solutions, requiring substantial time and effort. The use of large language models (LLMs) introduces an additional concern about training data contamination. Widely used public datasets often have extensive tutorials and worked analyses that models may have encountered during training. Students may therefore receive explanations drawn from existing analyses without practicing how to investigate unfamiliar data in collaboration with AI. This paper presents DataCanvas-EDU, an agentic framework for instructor-guided synthetic data generation in business analytics education. Instructors specify teaching goals and intended patterns through conversation, while an AI agent writes generation code, checks the resulting data, and prepares assignments, reference analyses, and rubrics. Four phases, Plan, Create, Verify / Test Analysis, and Evaluate, organize the process and support instructor review and revision. The framework is intended to simplify case preparation while creating opportunities for students to investigate newly designed patterns with AI. We illustrate the approach with WindowDash, a food delivery case containing 15,000 orders and nine designed patterns. DataCanvas-EDU is packaged as a reusable AI Agent Skill for compatible agent environments, with the package and installation instructions available at https://github.com/BANG23333/datacanvas-edu
Pulla tracks detailed student code solving steps for better teaching
Pulla: A Parsons Problem Tool for Fine-Grained Behavioral Tracing and Instructor-Facing Problem-Solving Analysis
Abstract: Existing Parsons problem tools primarily focus on correctness, indicating whether a student solved a problem, but providing limited visibility into the underlying problem-solving process. We address this gap by introducing Pulla, a Parsons problem tool that instruments programming assignments to capture fine-grained interaction data. These behavioral traces allow the system to surface recurring difficulty patterns, giving instructors actionable insights to inform targeted intervention decisions. This paper describes our experience in developing and deploying Pulla. We deployed the tool in two university courses: an upper-division software design course at the University of Houston (United States) and an introductory programming course at Aalto University (Finland). By analyzing the data collected, we identified common difficulty patterns, including misidentifying exception types, confusing return with the throw/raise mechanism, and incorrect control-flow ordering.