Many students are challenged with the demand of writing cohesive explanations. To support students in writing cohesive explanations, we developed a computer-based feedback tool that visualizes cohesion deficits of students' explanations in a concept map. We conducted three studies to investigate the effectiveness of such feedback as well as the underlying cognitive processes. In Study 1, we found that the concept map helped students identify potential cohesion gaps in their drafts and plan remedial revisions. In Study 2, students with concept map feedback conducted revisions that resulted in more locally and globally cohesive, and also more comprehensible, explanations than the explanations of students who revised without concept map feedback. In Study 3, we replicated the findings of Study 2 by and large. More importantly, students who had received concept map feedback on a training explanation 1 week later wrote a transfer explanation without feedback that was more cohesive than the explanation of students who had received no feedback on their training explanation. The automated concept map feedback appears to particularly support the evaluation phase of the revision process. Furthermore, the feedback enabled novice writers to acquire sustainable skills in writing cohesive explanations. (PsycINFO Database Record

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CohViz is a feedback system that provides students with concept maps as feedback on the cohesion of their writing. Although previous studies demonstrated the effectiveness of Coh-Viz, the accuracy of CohViz remains unclear. Thus, we conducted two comprehensive validation studies to assess the accuracy of CohViz in terms of its reliability and validity. In a reliability study, we compared the concept maps generated by CohViz with concept maps generated by four human expert raters based on a text corpus comprising students' explanatory texts (N = 100). Regarding the depiction of cohesion gaps, we obtained high accordance between the CohViz concept maps and the concept maps generated by the human expert raters. However, CohViz tended to overestimate the number of relations within the concept maps. In a validity study, we examined the validity of CohViz and compared central features of the CohViz concept maps with convergent linguistic features and divergent linguistic features based on a Wikipedia text corpus (N = 1020). We found medium to high agreement with the convergent cohesion features and low agreement with the divergent features. Together, these findings suggest that CohViz can be regarded as an accurate feedback system to provide feedback on the cohesion of students' writing.

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Writing cohesive texts is a crucial but challenging skill to master. Recently, cognitive tools that provide students with a graphical representation of their texts in the form of concept-maps have been shown to support students’ writing. Despite its beneficial effects, the addition of a graphical representation may have the disadvantage that students have to process multiple isolated representations (i.e., text, graphic), which may increase cognitive load. By applying principles of multimedia learning, in two experiments, we investigated whether interrepresentational signaling and spatial contiguity would have differential effects on students’ subsequent writing performance and on the processing of the graphical feedback. In Experiment 1, students wrote an expository text and either received conventional concept-map feedback, correspondence-enhanced concept-map feedback with interrepresentational signaling, spatially contiguous feedback, or no feedback during text revision. Regarding local cohesion, we found that students profited most when they received spatially contiguous feedback. Contrarily, correspondence-enhanced concept-map feedback was most effective for improving global cohesion. In Experiment 2, we examined the attentional processes while using correspondence-enhanced concept-map feedback versus conventional concept-map feedback by means of eye-tracking. Students receiving correspondence-enhanced concept-map feedback had longer fixation times on the concept-maps, more transitions between their text and the concept-map and were more efficient in improving their text for global cohesion than students receiving concept-maps without signaling. The findings suggest that interrepresentational signaling and spatial contiguity differentially contributed to students’ writing. Therefore, choosing the adequate format of instructional support plays a critical role in scaffolding students’ writing.