Writing Analytics: Broadening the Community (original) (raw)
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Writing Analytics: Methodological and Conceptual Developments
The Journal of Writing Analytics, 2018
Welcome to Volume 2 of The Journal of Writing Analytics. As the scholars in this issue demonstrate, writing analytics is emerging as a vibrant field of study. As editors, we are encouraged to see that important methodological and conceptual developments are becoming apparent that serve to deepen and strengthen the field in significant ways. This issue contains seven research articles, two research notes, and a special section featuring research presented at a US educational measurement conference. As was the case with Volume 1 in 2017, our 2018 authors advance a remarkable range of research. And, as was the case last year, this year’s authors continue to come from diverse fields advancing focused interest. We begin by introducing the research of our colleagues and then turn to a reflection on the developments we see in their work. For Volume 2, see https://journals.colostate.edu/analytics/issue/view/13
A Taxonomy for Writing Analytics
This article proposes a functional taxonomy for the growing research specialization 1 of writing analytics (WA). Building on prior efforts to taxonomize research areas in WA and learning analytics, this taxonomy aims to scaffold a coherent and relevant WA research agenda, including a commitment to reflection, evidence-based propositions, and multidisciplinarity as the research specialization evolves. To this end, the article offers a conceptual and practical overview of WA in the following sections: history, theorization, implementation paradigms, data, digital environments, analytic processes and uses, assessment, ethical considerations, and ongoing challenges. This overview highlights current limitations and needed WA research as well as valuable opportunities for the future of WA.
The Journal of Writing Analytics, 2019
Consideration of the intersections of humanistic and empirical traditions of research are important, especially now with recent emphasis on fairness and consequences of score use. Humanistic research traditions can enhance research perspectives within the emerging field of writing analytics. Using two case studies from The Journal of Writing Assessment (JWA), this article explores the ways humanistic traditions facilitate a framework developed by JWA of localism. Such a perspective provides a bridge between the technically focused concerns for validity and reliability with the complex social contexts and diverse backgrounds and lived experiences of students and faculty who occupy these educational settings. For writing analytics to live up to its potential, the practices and scholarship need to meet high technical standards as well as attend to diverse and socially situated assessment concerns.
When used effectively, reflective writing tasks can deepen learners' understanding of key concepts, help them critically appraise their developing professional identity, and build qualities for lifelong learning. As such, reflecting writing is attracting substantial interest from universities concerned with experiential learning, reflective practice, and developing a holistic conception of the learner. However, reflective writing is for many students a novel genre to compose in, and tutors may be inexperienced in its assessment. While these conditions set a challenging context for automated solutions, natural language processing may also help address the challenge of providing real time, formative feedback on draft writing. This paper reports progress in designing a writing analytics application, detailing the methodology by which informally expressed rubrics are modelled as formal rhetorical patterns, a capability delivered by a novel web application. This has been through iterative evaluation on an independently human-annotated corpus, showing improvements from the first to second version. We conclude by discussing the reasons why classifying reflective writing has proven complex, and reflect on the design processes enabling work across disciplinary boundaries to develop the prototype to its current state.
Literary Analysis Tool: Text Analytics for Creative Writers
2020
Creative writers struggle with obtaining reliable and consistent readers for their draft works. Human reviewers are notoriously inconsistent across different reviewers, and a single reviewer’s feedback can vary significantly over time. Additionally, there are logistical issues with human feedback. We apply text analytics techniques to literary works with the goal of aiding writers in revisions. For a set of text, the Literary Analysis Tool (LAT) provides objective statistics, windowed statistics over the length of the text, and mood analysis. The LAT provides quick feedback, at any time, in an absolutely objective manner. We present the feedback of a small set of creative writers. The results indicate that text analytics has a place in the creative writing process.
Exploring Writing Analytics and Postsecondary Success Indicators
Grantee Submission, 2019
Writing is a challenge and a potential obstacle for students in U.S. 4-year postsecondary institutions lacking prerequisite writing skills. Building on Anonymous, we collected authentic coursework writing from students enrolled at six 4-year colleges, extracted natural language processing (NLP) writing features (analytics), and examined relationships between analytics and college grade point average (GPA). Consistent with Anonymous, findings suggest that NLP writing analytics may contribute to college GPA prediction. Implications are that real-�me NLP wri�ng analy�cs from authen�c coursework wri�ng from students could be leveraged to efficiently track success and flag poten�al obstacles during students' college careers.
Methodology : from speaking about writing to tracking text production
2013
Doing writing research from an applied linguistics perspective means investigating individual, collaborative, and organizational writing and text production as language-based activities in complex and dynamic real-life contexts. In doing so, micro and macro levels, product and process perspectives, as well as theoretical and practical questions are combined in transdisciplinary approaches. Appropriate methods have to be deliberately chosen and transparently explained across disciplinary boundaries. Methodological questions need to be clarified, such as: which method fits which problem – and how should and can various methods complement each other? In this chapter, we start from two methodologically complementary ways of doing research into real-life writing processes (Part 1). These approaches illustrate why collecting data represents a key problem in the history of writing research (2). We then outline a typology of state-of-the-art methods in writing research (3) and explain chall...