Understanding Vocabulary Growth Through An Adaptive Language Learning System

Learning analytics and educational data mining have gained an increased interest as an important way of understanding the way humans learn. The paper introduces an adaptive language learning system designed to track and accelerate the development of academic vocabulary skills thereby generating dense longitudinal data of individual vocabulary growth trajectories. We report on an exploratory study based on the dense longitudinal data obtained from our system. The goal is the study was twofold: (1) to examine the pace and shape of vocabulary growth trajectories and (2) to understand the role various individual differences factors play in explaining variation in such growth trajectories.