Measuring and Teaching Problem-solving Practices in Digital Learning Environments

Digital learning environments are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as a wide range of EdTech products and services enter classrooms and households across the globe. One salient attribute of these environments is their capacity to generate large amounts of data as students interact with the technology. These data logs can help construct a detailed picture of how students work on a task and provide valuable insights into their underlying competencies. At the same time, the sheer volume of interaction data poses challenges, such as how to extract meaningful behavioral patterns from the raw data and model them to assess specific constructs. This dissertation contributes to the efforts of educational researchers and practitioners in harnessing the data generated by digital technology to support teaching and learning, with an emphasis on using interactive tasks to assess and teach problem-solving practices.