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Lecture: On adaptive digital learning systems
[22.04.2025]"Adaptive digital learning systems should reflect the diversity of students, not just their different levels of knowledge" – this is the title of a lecture by Prof. Dr. Walt Detmar Meurers at the CATALPA research center, on May 8 at 5:45 pm, Building 2, Room 1 and 2 (in English). CATALPA invites all university members to join.
Photo: Jakob Studnar
Adaptive digital systems in education hold the promise to support students individually by selecting appropriate learning activities and scaffolding them with feedback. While such system development can build on many decades of research on intelligent tutoring systems, the focus of this research has been on tracing the development of knowledge in the domain to be learned.
This focus on knowledge contrasts with the nature of the student heterogeneity in real-life education, where learners do not just differ in their background in the subject domain, but also in terms of their language abilities, cognitive characteristics, interests, motivation, and socio-cultural background. Arguably, adaptive system should thus be able to engage a student in their zone of proximal development with activities that are varied in the different dimensions. Supporting variability of practice is also of immediate relevance for transfer-appropriate processing, to ensure that the learners can retrieve and productively use what they learned in varied contexts.
Photo: IWMIn this talk, Detmar Meurers will present two adaptive systems and how they tackle this challenge:
- the ALEE system for economics education (German) (a collaboration with Univ. Lüneburg and IÖB Oldenburg) and
- the FeedBook for English as a Foreign Language
Both systems were designed to support individualized practice complementing teacher-led classrooms. Detmar Meurers presents the results of several randomized controlled field studies he conducted in authentic school contexts and looks forward to discussing the opportunities arising from this conceptualization of adaptive systems for university education.
Detmar Meurers is heading the Language and AI in Education lab at the IWM Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen since 2024. He joined the Eberhardt Karls University of Tübingen in 2008 as Professor of Computational Linguistics. His research at the interface of computational linguistics and empirical educational research addresses both second and academic language acquisition as well as the use of language in subject-specific learning: from the analysis of linguistic complexity, the annotation and interpretation of learner corpora, and the evaluation of answers to reading comprehension tasks to the support of learning processes through intelligent tutoring systems or adaptive search engines.
Detmar Meurers is a member of the international Scientific Advisory Board at the CATALPA research center.
