The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine the relationship between focused keyboarding instruction and the required standardized assessments mandated by Federal and State authorities. Initial mandates required that the first assessment to be administered online would be the Writing Assessment by year 2014. The assessment given in…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference in the writing assessment scores for each of the four traits--development, focus and organization, language, and conventions--as measured by the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) of students who had a formal keyboarding course compared to those who did not. A…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of initial touch speed achievement of fifth grade keyboarding students on their touch keyboarding skill retention in seventh grade. This was a longitudinal study generating quantitative data. The subjects for this study were 132 seventh grade students from a suburban middle school in…

Although educators frequently use assessment to identify who needs supplemental instruction and if that instruction is working, there is a lack of research investigating assessment that informs what instruction students need. The purpose of the current study was to determine if a brief (approximately 20 min) task that reflects a common middle…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) for Math still use traditional data input methods: computers' keyboard and mouse. However, students usually solve math tasks using paper and pen. Therefore, the gap between the manner the students work and the requirements imposed by these typing-based systems expose students to an extraneous cognitive load,…

This study compared gender groups on the processes used in writing essays in an online assessment. Middle-school students from four grades responded to essays in two persuasive subgenres, argumentation and policy recommendation. Writing processes were inferred from four indicators extracted from students' keystroke logs. In comparison to males, on…

We used an unobtrusive approach, keystroke logging, to examine students' cognitive states during essay writing. Based on data contained in the logs, we classified writing process data into three states: text production, long pause, and editing. We used semi-Markov processes to model the sequences of writing states and compared the state transition…

This study investigates the effects of a scenario-based assessment design on students' writing processes. An experimental data set consisting of four design conditions was used in which the number of scenarios (one or two) and the placement of the essay task with respect to the lead-in tasks (first vs. last) were varied. Students' writing…

The quality of students' writing skills continues to concern educators. Because writing is essential to success in both college and career, poor writing can have lifelong consequences. Writing is now primarily done digitally, but students receive limited explicit instruction in digital writing. This lack of instruction means that students fail to…

The research on using event logs and item response time to study test-taking processes is rapidly growing in the field of educational measurement. In this study, we analyzed the keystroke logs collected from 761 middle school students in the United States as they completed a persuasive writing task. Seven variables were extracted from the…

This study took place in a school which adopted a "paperless classroom" policy. The purpose of the study was to examine whether students who learn in a paperless classroom really prefer reading and writing on computers rather than on paper and whether their preferences differ according to contextual conditions and personal differences.…

In this report, we examine the feasibility of characterizing writing performance using process features derived from a keystroke log. Using data derived from a set of "CBAL"™ writing assessments, we examine the following research questions: (a) How stable are the keystroke timing and process features across testing occasions?; (b) How…

To investigate possible iPad related mode effect, we tested 403 8th graders in Indiana, Maryland, and New Jersey under three mode conditions through random assignment: a desktop computer, an iPad alone, and an iPad with an external keyboard. All students had used an iPad or computer for six months or longer. The 2-hour test included reading, math,…

The 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2016) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Sheraton Raleigh Hotel, in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in the USA. The conference, held June 29-July 2, 2016, follows the eight previous editions (Madrid 2015, London 2014, Memphis…