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El interés de este estudio se ha centrado en conocer el grado de adecuación de los estudiantes de primer curso universitario a las necesidades de aprendizaje que plantea el nuevo marco del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior, en relación a los estilos de pensamiento, las metas académicas, la nota de entrada en la titulación y las horas de estudio. Para ello, se ha trabajado con una muestra de 559 alumnos/as universitarios de primer curso de 11 titulaciones pertenecientes a la Universidad de Oviedo, con un total de 190 hombres (34 %) y 369 mujeres (66 %). En esta investigación se han utilizado el Thinking Styles Questionnaire for Students (TSQS), el Cuestionario para la Evaluación de Metas Académicas-II (CEMA-II) y un cuestionario de datos personales y académicos. Los resultados de los análisis sugieren que los alumnos universitarios de primer año están orientados hacia metas de aprendizaje. Además, prefieren estilos de pensamiento relacionados con la resolución de las tareas de forma autónoma y creativa, independientemente de la titulación en la que estén matriculados.

Research has suggested that the relationship between previous academic achievement and student variables is mediated by parent and teacher expectations of the child's ability and future success. The goal of this study was to analyze the mediating role of teachers' expectations and teachers' perceptions of parents' expectations between previous academic achievement and variables in students with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) that are significant for school learning. The participants were 230 students with SLD from Spain, between 10 and 14 years old. Extrinsic variables influenced the students' intrinsic variables even more than the students' own experiences of academic success or failure. The way in which teachers in the child's academic life respond to prior results and the expectations they form can affect their instruction and, ultimately, the children's motivation, involvement, and persistence in learning.

The aim of this study was to predict university students' learning performance using different sources of performance and multimodal data from an Intelligent Tutoring System. We collected and preprocessed data from 40 students from different multimodal sources: learning strategies from system logs, emotions from videos of facial expressions, allocation and fixations of attention from eye tracking, and performance on posttests of domain knowledge. Our objective was to test whether the prediction could be improved by using attribute selection and classification ensembles. We carried out three experiments by applying six classification algorithms to numerical and discretized preprocessed multimodal data. The results show that the best predictions were produced using ensembles and selecting the best attributes approach with numerical data.

Content assessment has broadly improved in e-learning scenarios in recent decades. However, the e-Learning process can give rise to a spatial and temporal gap that poses interesting challenges for assessment of not only content, but also students' acquisition of core skills such as self-regulated learning. Our objective was to discover students' self-regulated learning processes during an e-Learning course by using Process Mining Techniques. We applied a new algorithm in the educational domain called "Inductive Miner" over the interaction traces from 101 university students in a course given over one semester on the Moodle 2.0 platform. Data was extracted from the platform's event logs with 21,629 traces in order to discover students' self-regulation models that contribute to improving the instructional process. The "Inductive Miner" algorithm discovered optimal models in terms of fitness for both Pass and Fail students in this dataset, as well as models at a certain level of granularity that can be interpreted in educational terms, which are the most important achievement in model discovery. We can conclude that although students who passed did not follow the instructors' suggestions exactly, they did follow the logic of a successful self-regulated learning process as opposed to their failing classmates. The Process Mining models also allow us to examine which specific actions the students performed, and it was particularly interesting to see a high presence of actions related to forum-supported collaborative learning in the Pass group and an absence of those in the Fail group.

Most massive open online courses (MOOC) use simple schemes for aggregating peer grades, taking the mean or the median, or compute weights from information other than the instructor's opinion about the students' knowledge. To reduce the difference between the instructor and students' aggregated scores, some proposals compute specific weights to aggregate the peer grades. In this work, we analyse the use of students' engagement and performance measures to compute personalized weights and study the validity of the aggregated scores produced by these common functions, mean, and median, together with two others from the information retrieval field, the geometric and harmonic means. To test this procedure, we have analysed data from a MOOC about Philosophy. The course had 1,059 students registered, and 91 participated in a peer review process that consisted in writing an essay and rating three of their peers using a rubric. We compared the aggregation scores obtained using weighted and nonweighted versions of the functions. Our results show that the correlation between the aggregated scores and the instructor's grades can be improved in relation to peer grading, when using the median and weights are computed according to students' performance in chapter tests.

The underlying processes used in written compositions are currently a very interesting subject. Participants in this study were 326 people between 10 and 16 years of age, divided into two groups and compared by means of a "writing log". One group was provided assistance in the writing task by means of a graphic organiser, whilst the other was not given any help. Each of these groups is divided into two subgroups and evaluated with a time interval register, with an average interval temporal range of 45 seconds for one group and 90 seconds for the other, marked by a beep sound during the writing task (Kellogg's procedure). The pupils must register their activity in the process categories when the beep is heard. The results indicated that both the recording interval and the presence of the graphic organiser alter the processes in writing-time (time and order), while there was no effect of text genre. The educational implications relevant to the study are discussed. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

The current investigation aims at assessing the effectiveness of an intervention program designed to enhance self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies at the university level, with students from different cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds. The central tool of the program is a set of letters in which a fictional first-year student describes his experiences as an SRL student. The program was implemented in four universities in different countries and continents (Portugal, Spain, Chile, and Mozambique), with an experimental group and a comparison group at each university (263 students from experimental groups and 247 from comparison groups). Findings display the effectiveness of the program in enhancing a set of motivational variables related to the study process and the use of SRL strategies. Data were consistent across the different cultural and academic contexts in which the program was implemented. The implications of these findings for university administrators and faculty are discussed.

The authors intended to (a) identify the association between gender or grade level and teachers' homework (HW) feedback and (b) examine the relationship between teachers' HW feedback, HW-related behaviors (e.g., amount of HW completed), and academic achievement. Four hundred fifty-four students (Grades 5-12) participated in this study. The results showed that (a) at higher grade levels, there is a lower perceived amount of teachers' HW feedback; (b) teachers' HW feedback as perceived by students is positively and significantly related to the amount of HW completed and to the perceived quality of HW time management but not to the amount of time spent on HW; (c) the amount of HW completed and the perceived quality of HW time management positively and significantly predict academic achievement; and (d) teachers' HW feedback as perceived by students has an indirect relationship with students' academic achievement by its effect on students' HW-related behaviors.

Research has suggested that the relationship between previous academic achievement and student variables is mediated by parent and teacher expectations of the child's ability and future success. The goal of this study was to analyze the mediating role of teachers' expectations and teachers' perceptions of parents' expectations between previous academic achievement and variables in students with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) that are significant for school learning. The participants were 230 students with SLD from Spain, between 10 and 14 years old. Extrinsic variables influenced the students' intrinsic variables even more than the students' own experiences of academic success or failure. The way in which teachers in the child's academic life respond to prior results and the expectations they form can affect their instruction and, ultimately, the children's motivation, involvement, and persistence in learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examined the relationship between ADHD and writing performance. Method: Students in Grades 3 to 7, 84 with ADHD and 135 age- and gender-matched controls completed a writing task (including process logs), and measures of working memory and attention. Results: Students with ADHD wrote texts of similar length but with poorer structure, coherence, and ideation. In all, 6.7% of the variance in writing quality was explained by whether or not the student had an ADHD diagnosis, after control for IQ and age-within-year, with ADHD students producing text that was less coherent, well structured, and ideationally rich, and spending less time thinking about and reviewing their text. Half of the effect on text quality could be attributed to working memory and sustained attention effects. Conclusion: ADHD has some effect on writing performance, which can, in part, be explained by working memory and attentional deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]