Natural Language Processing Technologies to Inform Practices in Science

By exploiting advances in natural language processing (NLP), NLP-TIPS detects the rich ideas students develop during everyday experience. The project takes advantage of NLP methods for detecting student ideas to design adaptive guidance that gets each student started on reconsidering their own ideas and pursuing deeper understanding. This work continues a successful partnership between University of California, Berkeley, Educational Testing Service (ETS), and science teachers and paraprofessionals from six middle schools enrolling students from diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups whose cultural experiences may be neglected in science instruction.