This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers' thought processes while reading texts when they are instructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associated with deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1, college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphrase or self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was…

Game-based practice within Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can be optimized by examining how properties of practice activities influence learning outcomes and motivation. In the current study, we manipulated when game-based practice was available to students. All students (n = 149) first completed lesson videos in iSTART-2, an ITS focusing on…

Source-based essays are evaluated both on the quality of the writing and the content appropriate interpretation and use of source material. Hence, composing a high-quality source-based essay (an essay written based on source material) relies on skills related to both reading (the sources) and writing (the essay) skills. As such, source-based…

Writing training systems have been developed to provide students with instruction and deliberate practice on their writing. Although generally successful in providing accurate scores, a common criticism of these systems is their lack of personalization and adaptive instruction. In particular, these systems tend to place the strongest emphasis on…

The relationship between working memory capacity and writing ability was examined via a linguistic analysis of student essays. Undergraduate students (n = 108) wrote timed, prompt-based essays and completed a battery of cognitive assessments. The surface- and discourse-level linguistic features of students' essays were then analyzed using natural…

Revising is an essential writing process yet automated writing evaluation systems tend to give feedback on discrete essay drafts rather than changes across drafts. We explore the feasibility of automated revision detection and its potential to guide feedback. Relationships between revising behaviors and linguistic features of students' essays are…

The development of strong writing skills is a critical (and somewhat obvious) goal within the classroom. Individuals across the world are now expected to reach a high level of writing proficiency to achieve success in both academic settings and the workplace (Geiser & Studley, 2001; Powell, 2009; Sharp, 2007). Unfortunately, strong writing…

This study investigates how and whether information about students' writing can be recovered from basic behavioral data extracted during their sessions in an intelligent tutoring system for writing. We calculate basic and time-sensitive keystroke indices based on log files of keys pressed during students' writing sessions. A corpus of prompt-based…

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,…

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)…

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the literature on writing. Previous research suggests that higher quality…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are situated in a potential struggle between effective pedagogy and system enjoyment and engagement. iSTART, a reading strategy tutoring system in which students practice generating self-explanations and using reading strategies, employs two devices to engage the user. The first is natural language processing…

When students exhibit control and employ a strategic plan of action over a situation they are said to be demonstrating agency (Bandura, 2001). The current work is comprised of two studies designed to investigate how agency manifests within students' choice patterns and ultimately influences self-explanation quality within the game-based system…

This study builds upon previous work aimed at developing a student model of reading comprehension ability within the intelligent tutoring system, iSTART. Currently, the system evaluates students' self-explanation performance using a local, sentence-level algorithm and does not adapt content based on reading ability. The current study leverages…

This study evaluates the use of a hierarchical classification approach to automated assessment of essays. Automated essay scoring (AES) generally relies onmachine learning techniques that compute essay scores using a set of text variables. Unlike previous studies that rely on regression models, this study computes essay scores using a hierarchical…