Computer-Assisted Research Writing in the Disciplines

Abstract

It is arguably very important for students to acquire writing skills from kindergarten through high school. In college, students must further develop their writing in order to successfully continue on to graduate school. Moreover, they have to be able to write good theses, dissertations, conference papers, journal manuscripts, and other research genres to obtain their graduate degree. However, opportunities to develop research writing skills are often limited to traditional student-advisor discussions (Pearson & Brew, 2002). Part of the problem is that graduate students are expected to be good at such writing because if they "can think well, they can write well" (Turner, 2012, p. 18). Education and academic literacy specialists oppose this assumption. They argue that advanced academic writing competence is too complex to be automatically acquired while learning about or doing research (Aitchison & Lee, 2006). Aspiring student-scholars need to practice and internalize a style of writing that conforms to discipline-specific conventions, which are norms of writing in particular disciplines such as Chemistry, Engineering, Agronomy, and Psychology. Motivated by this need, the Research Writing Tutor (RWT) was designed to assist the research writing of graduate students. RWT leverages the conventions of scientific argumentation in one of the most impactful research genres -the research article. This chapter first provides a theoretical background for research writing competence. Second, it discusses the need for technology that would facilitate the development of this competence. The description of RWT as an exemplar of such technology is then followed by a review of evaluation studies. The chapter concludes with recommendations for RWT integration into the classroom and with directions for further development of this tool. Disciplines Early Childhood Education | Educational Technology | English Language and Literature | Language and Literacy Education | Technical and Professional Writing CommentsThis is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Adaptive Educational

Applying the Bundle–Move Connection Approach to the Development of an Online Writing Support Tool for Research Articles

“…The results of their study suggested that the Mover could be used to help users, particularly L2 scientists and engineers, better understand and construct research papers in different fields and disciplines. Another recent development in the automated move-based technologies is the Research Writing Tutor, developed by Cotos (2014Cotos ( , 2016 and her colleagues (Cotos, Huffman, & Link, 2015). The Research Writing Tutor is a pedagogical tool for teaching and learning disciplinary research article writing, which aims to advance genre-based writing instruction to the next level by incorporating an automated writing evaluation program (i.e., the Research Writing Tutor identifies move and step boundaries automatically and uses them as criteria for automated feedback).…”

A move/step model for methods sections: Demonstrating Rigour and Credibility

“…advancement in this direction is using move-annotated corpus data to train genre-based automated writing evaluation and feedback technology (Cotos, 2016).…”

Are You Being Rhetorical? A Description of Rhetorical Move Annotation Tools and Open Corpus of Sample Machine-Annotated Rhetorical Moves

“…Following Swales's (1990) move analysis approach and drawing on his CARS model, the researchers developed a comprehensive introduction-method-resultsdiscussion/conclusion (IMRD/C) move/step framework (see Figure 1 below from Cotos, Huffman, & Link, 2015). This framework was then applied to the development of different technical affordances of the RWT (Cotos, 2016).…”

“…A number of studies on usefulness and effectiveness have been conducted to inform RWT's iterative development and explore how RWT impacts students and their research writing. Empirical evidence indicates that students' interaction with this tool has a positive impact on cognition, revision strategies, learning of genre conventions, development of genre knowledge, writing improvement, and motivation (Cotos, 2016;Cotos, Huffman, & Link, 2020;. While RWT was initially designed to complement graduate writing pedagogy, it has been used in different learning environments, such as peer writing groups, one-on-one consultations with writing tutors, and graduate writing workshops.…”