The NLP Group at Penn State

  The NLP Lab has joined the efforts of several  EECS  departments to contribute to the  State College Area School District CEEL (Community Education Extended Learning) Program, an afterschool program with a focus on extending learning for students in grades K-5.  We contributed a CEEL unit called " Artificial Agents that Help Teachers Help Students in STEM Writing Activities ." Our unit presents an introduction to the ideas motivating our new NSF Award, " Supporting Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms through Automated Analysis of Students' Writing " (in collaboration with Sadhana Puntambekar, U Wis, Madison.  It explains why good science writing goes hand in hand with good science, why teachers and students struggle with science writing, and how NLP can help. It gives a simple introductory lesson in distributional semantics, with activities for the students. You can find our unit on the  EECS CEEL  page, which has a download link  here .

We have an  announcement about a new project funded by NSF!  Becky Passonneau has a new 4-year  NSF project  on automated analysis of middle school students' STEM writing, as of 08/01/2020. This project is a collaboration among one of the leaders in the field of learning design,  Sadhana Puntambekar ,  Becky Passonneau  as a leader in the field of natural language processing technology applied to education, and  ChanMin Kim  (PSU, Education), a leader in the interface between learning design and educational technology.  The project will develop a collaborative "Writer's Notebook" for teaching middle school science, for use interactively in the classroom by students and teachers.  Scientific writing skills are an important part of communicating about science, and learning new science concepts. The Writers Notebook will be used in several middle schools in Wisconsin. The component piece of the Writers Notebook developed at PSU for analyzing students' written work wi