This study examines links between essay quality and text elaboration and text cohesion. For this study, 35 students wrote two essays (on two different prompts) and for each, were given 15 minutes to elaborate on their original text. An expert in discourse comprehension then modified the original and elaborated essays to increase cohesion,…

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

This study uses a moving windows self-paced reading task to assess text comprehension of beginning and intermediate-level simplified texts and authentic texts by L2 learners engaged in a text-retelling task. Linear mixed effects (LME) models revealed statistically significant main effects for reading proficiency and text level on the number of…

This study investigates a novel approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines natural language processing approaches that assess text features with approaches that assess individual differences in writers such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining text…

An important topic in writing research has been the use of cohesive features. Much of this research has focused on local and text cohesion. The few studies that have studied global cohesion have been restricted to first language writing. This study investigates the development of local, global, and text cohesion in the writing of 57 language (L2)…

This study investigates a new approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines traditional approaches based on assessing textual features with new approaches that measure student attributes such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining both text features and…

This study investigates the relative efficacy of using linguistic micro-features, the aggregation of such features, and a combination of micro-features and aggregated features in developing automatic essay scoring (AES) models. Although the use of aggregated features is widespread in AES systems (e.g., e-rater; Intellimetric), very little…

We investigated linguistic factors that relate to misalignment between students' and teachers' ratings of essay quality. Students (n = 126) wrote essays and rated the quality of their work. Teachers then provided their own ratings of the essays. Results revealed that students who were less accurate in their self-assessments produced essays that…

Completion rates for massive open online classes (MOOCs) are notoriously low, but learner intent is an important factor. By studying students who drop out despite their intent to complete the MOOC, it may be possible to develop interventions to improve retention and learning outcomes. Previous research into predicting MOOC completion has focused…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

A number of studies have demonstrated links between linguistic knowledge and performance in math. Studies examining these links in first language speakers of English have traditionally relied on correlational analyses between linguistic knowledge tests and standardized math tests. For second language (L2) speakers, the majority of studies have…

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) designed to provide students with explicit writing strategy instruction and practice. W-Pal includes a suite of educational games developed to increase writing engagement and provide opportunities to practice writing strategies. In this study, first (L1) (n = 26) and second (L2)…

The study applied the Multi-Dimensional analysis used by Biber (1988) to examine the functional parameters of essays. Co-occurrence patterns were identified within an essay corpus (n=1529) using a linguistic indices provided by Co-Metrix. These patterns were used to identify essay groups that shared features based upon situational parameters.…

This study investigates the potential for linguistic microfeatures related to length, complexity, cohesion, relevance, topic, and rhetorical style to predict L2 writing proficiency. Computational indices were calculated by two automated text analysis tools (Coh- Metrix and the Writing Assessment Tool) and used to predict human essay ratings in a…

The current study examined relationships between expert human judgments of text quality and grammar and mechanical errors in student writing. A corpus of essays (N = 100) written by high school students in the W-Pal system was collected, coded for grammar and mechanical errors, and scored by expert human raters. Results revealed weak relations…