This article presents new algorithms for inferring users’ activities in a class of flexible and open-ended educational software called exploratory learning environments (ELE). Such settings provide a rich educational environment for students, but challenge teachers to keep track of students’ progress and to assess their performance. This article presents techniques for recognizing students activities in ELEs and visualizing these activities to students. It describes a new plan recognition algorithm that takes into account repetition and interleaving of activities. This algorithm was evaluated empirically using two ELEs for teaching chemistry and statistics used by thousands of students in several countries. It was able to outperform the state-of-the-art plan recognition algorithms when compared to a gold-standard that was obtained by a domain-expert. We also show that visualizing students’ plans improves their performance on new problems when compared to an alternative visualization that consists of a step-by-step list of actions.

A process for analyzing log files collected from open-ended learning environments is developed and tested on a virtual lab problem involving reaction stoichiometry. The process utilizes a set of visualization tools that, by grouping student actions in a hierarchical manner, helps experts make sense of the linear list of student actions recorded in a raw log file. Such analysis of an initial set of log files is then used to develop a rule-based system that can automatically classify the problem-solving strategies being engaged in by the students. The strategies assigned by the resulting rule-based system compare well with strategy codes assigned by experts.

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