Jalal Nouri

Jalal Nouri
Stockholm University | SU · Department of Computer and Systems Sciences

Professor

About

131
Publications
85,127
Reads
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3,355
Citations
Introduction
Jalal Nouri is a professor in Technology-enhanced learning at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. He currently works with projects related to Learning Analytics, AI for education, and programming education.
Education
October 2009 - August 2014
Stockholm University
Field of study
  • Technology Enhanced Learning
January 2007 - January 2008
University of Gävle
Field of study
August 2001 - June 2006

Publications

Publications (131)
Article
Full-text available
Teachers around the world have started teaching programming at the K-9 level, some due to the formal introduction of programming in the national curriculum, others without such pressure and on their own initiative. In this study, we attempted to understand which skills – both CT-related and general – are developed in the process. To do so, we inter...
Article
Full-text available
Information and communication technologies are increasingly mediating learning and teaching practices as well as how educational institutions are handling their administrative work. As such, students and teachers are leaving large amounts of digital footprints and traces in various educational apps and learning management platforms, and educational...
Conference Paper
In this paper, we propose a counterfactual explanations-based approach to provide automatic and intelligent recommendation that supports students self-regulation of learning in a data-driven manner, aiming to improve their performance in courses. Prior studies within the field of learning analytics and AI in education predict students’ performance...
Conference Paper
Collaborative learning, as a method for education, has become quite central nowadays. Nevertheless, what has also been shown is that productive collaborative learning is not something that unfolds naturally without orchestration and the provision of good conditions. One such important aspect is the actual formation of groups. That is, on what basis...
Conference Paper
Knowledge tracing—where a machine models the students’ knowledge as they interact with coursework—is a well-established area in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education. In this paper, an ensemble approach is proposed that addresses existing limitations in question-centric knowledge tracing and achieves the goal of predicting future questi...
Article
Full-text available
Data-driven methods are being implemented in many schools around the world to improve education. In this study, two schools were studied to investigate how they implemented datadriven methods for the monitoring and improvement of the well-being of their students. These schools were part of a Swedish national program where 15 schools participated to...
Article
Full-text available
Learning analytics (LA) is an important area of study in technology-enhanced learning that has emerged during the last decade. In earlier years, several systematic reviews have been conducted that focused on the theories behind LA or on empirical studies that utilized LA-based methods to improve learning and teaching processes in higher education....
Article
Full-text available
Educational content recommendation is a cornerstone of AI-enhanced learning. In particular, to facilitate navigating the diverse learning resources available on learning platforms, methods are needed for automatically linking learning materials, e.g., in order to recommend textbook content based on exercises. Such methods are typically based on sem...
Chapter
Practice and exam-style questions, as essential educational tools, contribute to educators’ effective teaching. Automatic question generation (QG) is a promising technique that can eliminate the manual effort of constructing questions and boost technology-enhanced education systems. Recently, deep neural network-based question-generation approaches...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have shown remarkable performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including educational question answering (EQA). However, LLMs generate text entirely based on knowledge obtained during pre-training, which means they struggle with recent information or domain-specific knowledge base...
Chapter
Providing personalized support to students during courses is essential to facilitate them in their desired learning goals and reduce the dropout rate. Although teachers can play an effective role in providing personalized support, achieving individual-level assistance for massive courses becomes challenging. To overcome this challenge, this paper p...
Article
Full-text available
Data-driven school improvement has been proposed to improve and support educational practices, and more studies are emerging describing data-driven practices in schools and the effects of data-driven interventions. This paper reports on a study that has taken place within a national program where 15 schools from 6 different municipalities and organ...
Book
Full-text available
Slutrapporten för det treåriga FoU-programmet Datadriven skolförbättring kan laddas ner här: https://ifous.se/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/slutrapport-2023-05-31.pdf
Article
Full-text available
Self-regulated learning is an essential skill that can help students plan, monitor, and reflect on their learning in order to achieve their learning goals. However, in situations where there is a lack of effective feedback and recommendations, it becomes challenging for students to self-regulate their learning. In this paper, we propose an explaina...
Article
Full-text available
Automated Essay Scoring (AES) automatically allocates scores to essays at scale and may help teachers reduce the heavy burden during grading activities. Recently, researchers have deployed neural-based AES approaches to improve upon the state-of-the-art AES performance. These neural-based AES methods mainly take student essays as the sole input and...
Chapter
Full-text available
Educational concepts are the core of teaching and learning. From the perspective of educational technology, concepts are essential meta-data, representative terms that can connect different learning materials, and are the foundation for many downstream tasks. Some studies on automatic concept extraction have been conducted, but there are no studies...
Chapter
Automated Essay Scoring (AES) automatically assign scores to essays at scale and may help to support teachers’ grading activities. Recently, AES methods based on deep neural networks (DNN) have significantly improved upon the state-of-the-art performance by learning relations between holistic essay scores and student essays. However, DNN-based AES...
Chapter
Cognitive training aims to improve skills such as working memory capacity and spatial ability, which have been linked to math skills. In this study, we fit Deep Knowledge Tracing with Transformers (DKTT), Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks (DKVMN), and Knowledge Tracing Machines (KTM) to a large dataset from a cognitive training system. DKVMN achiev...
Conference Paper
Cognitive training aims to improve skills such as working memory capacity and spatial ability, which have been linked to math skills. In this study, we fit Deep Knowledge Tracing with Transformers (DKTT), Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks (DKVMN), and Knowledge Tracing Machines (KTM) to a large dataset from a cognitive training system. DKVMN achiev...
Article
Full-text available
I många länder världen runt har digitalisering och programmering införts i läroplaner för förskola och grundskola. Under senare tid har flera studier om undervisning i programmering i olika sammanhang genomförts. Dessa studier har oftast haft fokus på elever från 7 år och äldre och det finns få studier som rapporterar om införandet av programmering...
Chapter
Many national curricula have incorporated computational thinking (CT) into compulsory education. Teacher ability to deliver the revised curriculum determines whether these new skills can be successfully integrated into teaching. Therefore, it is crucial to examine teacher readiness. This study measured Swedish K-9 teacher CT skills through a CT tes...
Article
Full-text available
Formative feedback has long been recognised as an effective tool for student learning, and researchers have investigated the subject for decades. However, the actual implementation of formative feedback practices is associated with significant challenges because it is highly time-consuming for teachers to analyse students’ behaviours and to formula...
Article
Full-text available
This study represents the first research effort to explore the transition from traditional teaching into distance teaching in Swedish schools enforced by covid-19. Governments made gradual and injudicious decisions to impede the spread of the pandemic (covid-19) in 2020. The enactment of new measures affected critical societal functions and include...
Chapter
Collaborative learning has grown more popular as a form of instruction in recent decades, with a significant number of studies demonstrating its benefits from many perspectives of theory and methodology. However, it has also been demonstrated that effective collaborative learning does not occur spontaneously without orchestrating collaborative lear...
Chapter
Today, collaborative learning has become quite central as a method for learning, and over the past decades, a large number of studies have demonstrated the benefits from various theoretical and methodological perspectives. This study proposes a novel approach that utilises Natural Language Processing(NLP) methods, particularly pre-trained word embe...
Chapter
This paper proposes a novel approach that employs learning analytics techniques combined with explainable machine learning to provide automatic and intelligent actionable feedback that supports students self-regulation of learning in a data-driven manner. Prior studies within the field of learning analytics predict students’ performance and use the...
Chapter
Knowledge tracing—where a machine models the students’ knowledge as they interact with coursework—is a well-established area in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education. In this paper, an ensemble approach is proposed that addresses existing limitations in question-centric knowledge tracing and achieves the goal of predicting future questi...
Article
Full-text available
It has been argued that participation as involvement as well as taking part in decision making is a fundamental part of learning. The first large arena for experiencing this for many young people is the school. This paper investigates how 16 pupils at grade eight view their own and their teacher’s role when it comes to facilitating participation. T...
Conference Paper
Today, collaborative learning has become quite central as a method for learning and over the past decades, a large number of studies have demonstrated the benefits from various theoretical and methodological perspectives. This study proposes a novel approach that utilizes Natural Language Processing(NLP) methods, and in particular, pre-trained word...
Chapter
Full-text available
Recently, students have become networked in many ways, and evidence is mounting that networking plays a significant role in how students learn, interact, and transfer information. Relationships could translate to opportunities; resources and support that help achieve the pursued goals and objectives. Although students exist, interact, and play diff...
Article
Full-text available
Recently, students have become networked in many ways, and evidence is mounting that networking plays a significant role in how students learn, interact, and transfer information. Relationships could translate to opportunities; resources and support that help achieve the pursued goals and objectives. Although students exist, interact, and play diff...
Article
Full-text available
Learning Analytics (LA) approaches in Blended Learning (BL) research is becoming an established field. In the light of previous critiqued toward LA for not being grounded in theory, the General Data Protection and a renewed focus on individuals’ integrity, this review aims to explore the use of theories, the methodological and analytic approaches i...
Article
Full-text available
Productive and effective collaborative learning is rarely a spontaneous phenomenon but rather the result of meeting a set of conditions, orchestrating and scaffolding productive interactions. Several studies have demonstrated that conflicts can have detrimental effects on student collaboration. Through the application of network science, and social...
Preprint
Full-text available
This study represents the first research effort to explore the transition from traditional teaching into crisis-prompted distance education in Swedish schools enforced by covid-19. Governments made gradual decisions to impede the spread of the pandemic in 2020. The enactment of new measures affected critical societal functions and included travel r...
Article
Full-text available
Student engagement is critical for learning. However, little is known about engagement and disengagement and particular social groups. Recent research has alerted that engagement in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) settings may manifest differently than engagement in analogue learning settings. This study explores how different social groups of u...
Experiment Findings
Article
Full-text available
Utbrottet av Corona (covid-19) under vårvintern 2020, och konsekvenserna av det för olika samhällsfunktioner, kom oväntat och hastigt i Sverige. Flyg ställdes in, och inom kort stängde flera länder sina gränser. Italien var det land i Europa som drabbades hårdast först. Människor uppmanades att stanna hemma. Skolor hade stängts runt om i Europa, oc...
Article
Full-text available
Computational thinking has been introduced in many countries around the world and teachers are working intensely to incorporate programming activities in the classroom. However, teachers are faced with several challenges due to the fact that there is still little research conducted focusing on programming education for younger children, that progra...
Article
Sew: Vuxenutbildning i samverkan, publicerad 20-04-14: www.visnet.se/reportage
Conference Paper
Full-text available
There has been significant efforts in studying collaborative and social learning using aggregate networks. Such efforts have demonstrated the worth of the approach by providing insights about the interactions, student and teacher roles, and predictability of performance. However, using an aggregated network discounts the fine resolution of temporal...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A learning process involves interactions between learners, teachers, machines and formal and/or informal learning environments. These interactions are relational, interdependent and temporal. The emergence of rich multimodal learner data suggests the development of methods that can capture time-stamped data from multiple sources (e.g., heart rate d...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract Background Although there is a wealth of research focusing on PBL, most studies employ self-reports, surveys, and interviews as data collection methods and have an exclusive focus on students. There is little research that has studied interactivity in online PBL settings through the lens of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to explore both stu...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Although there is a wealth of research focusing on PBL, most studies employ self-reports, surveys, and interviews as data collection methods and have an exclusive focus on students. There is little research that has studied interactivity in online PBL settings through the lens of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to explore both student and...
Article
Full-text available
With the digitalisation of education increasing, the relationship between student engagement in Technology-enhanced Learning (TEL) and digital skills has remained largely unexplored. There is a strong consensus that engagement is necessary for students to succeed in school. We hypothesised that students reporting high and low levels of general enga...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The association between mathematics and programming in an educational context is not new. Today, programming has been introduced into curricula worldwide for younger children. In the Swedish case, primary school teachers are expected to integrate programming in mathematics education from autumn 2018. However, Swedish teachers' knowledge of programm...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Although Computational Thinking and Programming have become obligatory in many national curricula, the majority of teachers in practice are currently in dire need of support from both the research and teaching community. A national research and teacher development project was initiated in Sweden to address this issue. To develop their pedagogical c...
Article
Stu­dents need to en­gage in or­der to learn. As dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion changes the con­di­tions for learn­ing, it is es­sen­tial to con­sider how stu­dent en­gage­ment might be af­fected. This study ex­plores the re­la­tion­ship be­tween stu­dent en­gage­ment (and dis­en­gage­ment) in tech­nol­ogy-en­hanced learn­ing (TEL) and aca­d­e­mic out­comes....
Article
Full-text available
Information and communication technologies have increasingly been integrated in our everyday lives, and as many would say changed how we acquire knowledge and how we learn. It is against such a background this paper will describe how higher education students engage with technology during self-studies and how they in particular utilize different se...
Chapter
Many national curricula have incorporated Computational Thinking (CT) in compulsory education. Teachers' ability to deliver the revised curriculum determines whether these new skills can be successfully integrated into teaching. Therefore, it is crucial to examine teachers' readiness. This study measured Swedish K-9 teachers' CT skills through a CT...
Chapter
Full-text available
Effective collaborative learning is rarely a spontaneous phenomenon. In fact, it requires that a set of conditions are met. Among these central conditions are group formation, size and interaction dynamics. While previous research has demonstrated that size might have detrimental effects on collaborative learning, few have examined how social dynam...
Chapter
Full-text available
The master thesis is the last formal step in most universities around the world. However, all students do not finish their master thesis. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the non-completion of the master thesis should be viewed as a substantial problem that requires serious attention and proactive planning. This learning analytics study aims t...
Article
Full-text available
Learning analytics (LA) is a relatively new research discipline that uses data to try to improve learning, optimizing the learning process and develop the environment in which learning occurs. One of the objectives of LA is to monitor students’ activities and early predict performance to improve retention, offer personalized feedback and facilitate...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Since autumn 2018, teachers throughout Sweden are obliged to relate to programming in one way or another in the teaching, especially in the subject of mathematics and technology education. Although teachers should formally work with programming teaching from the autumn of 2018, programming has been taught in primary school for several years. While...
Preprint
Full-text available
Abstract. Effective collaborative learning is rarely a spontaneous phenom-enon. In fact, it requires that a set of conditions are met. Among these cen-tral conditions are group formation, size and interaction dynamics. While previous research has demonstrated that size might have detrimental effects on collaborative learning, few have examined how...
Article
Full-text available
The bachelor thesis is commonly a necessary last step towards the first graduation in higher education and constitutes a central key to both further studies in higher education and employment that requires higher education degrees. Thus, completion of the thesis is a desirable outcome for individual students, academic institutions and society, and...
Article
Full-text available
In this editorial, the first issue of the International Journal of Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Education is presented. The Journal of Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Education is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that aims to disseminate the highest quality research in the field. The journal aims to incr...
Article
Full-text available
Time dynamics is an important element of the self-regulated learning theory. Researchers have consistently reported that students who use time and learning strategies efficiently perform better than their counterparts who don’t. Likewise, there is a sufficient volume of evidence that supports the claim that delay in performing the learning tasks (p...
Article
Full-text available
In 2019, the mobile learning body of knowledge is extensive and much is known about the technology impacts and affordances of mobile devices in educational settings. A particular focus has now shifted toward specific technologies in specific subjects. Mathematics is one such subject and tab-lets are one such technology that is gaining attention. Th...
Article
Full-text available
The text below is the accepted version. For the FINAL version, please visit https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ZIfP1HucdHyVb [50 DAYS FREE SHARE LINK] . As computational thinking (CT) is being embraced by educational systems worldwide, researchers and teachers have posed important questions such as “what to teach” and “what can be learned.” These ques...
Article
Full-text available
The student experience with different aspects of online instructional settings has been the focus of educational practitioners and researchers in many studies. However, concerning technology-enabled formative assessment, little is known about student satisfaction regarding different possible formative e-assessment strategies the students are involv...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We know that employing collaborative learning strategies does not lead to productive collaborative learning per se. In fact, some groups are dysfunctional and might have a detrimental influence on group members. This issue has methodologically been studied through self-reported surveys, transcripts coding, and observational methods. Although these...
Conference Paper
Computational thinking has been introduced in many countries around the world and teachers are working intensely to incorporate programming activities in the classroom. However, teachers are faced with several challenges due to the fact that there is still little research conducted focusing on programming education for younger children, that progra...
Conference Paper
Learning analytics (LA) is a relatively new research discipline that uses data to try to improve learning, optimizing the learning process and develop the environment in which learning occurs. One of the objectives of LA is to monitor students’ activities and early predict performance to improve retention, offer personalized feedback and facilitate...
Article
Full-text available
Social network analysis (SNA) may be of significant value in studying online collaborative learning. SNA can enhance our understanding of the collaborative process, predict the under-achievers by means of learning analytics, and uncover the role dynamics of learners and teachers alike. As such, it constitutes an obvious opportunity to improve learn...
Conference Paper
As the popularity of “Computational Thinking” expands in the education realm, more and more studies have been conducted to investigate the effect of using visual programming languages, such as Scratch, to teach computational thinking. This paper provides an overview of the teaching strategies that were implemented in research studies that aimed at...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Learning games are played for various learning objectives in different educational contexts. Programming education is one context where several research studies have reported on positive outcomes. This study reviews games and gamified concepts that have been developed for K-9 students to learn basic programming with the aim to identify important fa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Programming education is a hot topic in many countries around the world. Also in Sweden this topic has received a lot of attention lately due to formal introduction of programming curriculum as of 2018. Mathematics is one of the subjects that is most affected by the curriculum changes as the government in Sweden has decided that teachers of mathema...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
For some years now many teachers around the world have explored programming with their pupils in K-9 education. Research has shown that educational games of different kinds are often utilized by teachers as a mean for teaching programming and developing computational thinking among pupils. However, teaching and learning programming and computationa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Although temporality is embodied in instructional design, implicitly present in several learning theories and central to the self-regulation of learning and awarding of credits, it has not received the due attention in the field education. This learning analytics study included four higher education courses in dental education over a full year dura...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Many countries around the world have introduced programming curriculum at K-9 level. For a number of years, a lot of studies have surfaced demonstrating enactments of programming education, for instance through the use of visual programming languages as Scratch in different contexts. However, these studies have had a dominating focus on students of...