The Writing-Pal

McNamara, Danielle S.; Raine, Roxanne B.; Roscoe, Rod D.; Crossley, Scott A.; Jackson, G. Tanner; Dai, Jie; Cai, Zhiqiang; Renner, Adam; Brandon, Russell; Weston, Jennifer L.; Dempsey, Kyle B.; Carney, Diana; Sullivan, Susan; Kim, Loel; Rus, Vasile; Floyd, Randy G.; McCarthy, Philip M.; Graesser, Arthur C.

doi:10.4018/978-1-60960-741-8.ch017

Cited by 19 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…In the development of W-Pal, we have sought to synthesize key principles of strategy instruction, modularity, extended practice, and formative feedback (McNamara et al, 2011). The interdisciplinary development of the initial version of W-Pal spanned over 3 years with input from cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, and English education.…”

Section: The Writing Palmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing pal: Feasibility of an intelligent writing strategy tutor in the high school classroom.

Roscoe

McNamara

2013

Journal of Educational Psychology

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107

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The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is a novel intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that offers writing strategy instruction, game-based practice, essay writing practice, and formative feedback to developing writers. Compared to more tractable and constrained learning domains for ITS, writing is an ill-defined domain because the features of effective writing are difficult to quantify and individual writers can employ diverse strategies to achieve similar goals. The development of an ITS in an ill-defined domain presents particular challenges regarding comprehensive instruction, modularized content, extended practice, and formative feedback. In this article, we describe how the development of W-Pal has uniquely addressed these concerns and present the results of a study assessing the feasibility of this system in high school English classrooms. This study included 2 teachers and their 141 10th grade English class students who utilized W-Pal over a 6-month period during the academic year. Log-file analyses showed that students used all aspects of W-Pal, but activity and engagement was uneven throughout the year and decreased over time. Essay scores improved over time and surveys indicated that students perceived the lessons, games, and feedback as beneficial. However, specific aspects of the learning environment were critiqued as annoying, challenging, or lacking specificity. Overall, the results suggest that the system was generally well-received by the students but also offer insights for the development of ITSs in ill-defined domains.

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Section: The Writing Palmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing pal: Feasibility of an intelligent writing strategy tutor in the high school classroom.

Roscoe

McNamara

2013

Journal of Educational Psychology

Self Cite

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Evaluating Machine Learning Approaches to Classify Pharmacy Students’ Reflective Statements

Liu

Shum

Mantzourani

et al. 2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Reflective writing is widely acknowledged to be one of the most effective learning activities for promoting students' self-reflection and critical thinking. However, manually assessing and giving feedback on reflective writing is time consuming, and known to be challenging for educators. There is little work investigating the potential of automated analysis of reflective writing, and even less on machine learning approaches which offer potential advantages over rule-based approaches. This study reports progress in developing a machine learning approach for the binary classification of pharmacy students' reflective statements about their work placements. Four common statistical classifiers were trained on a corpus of 301 statements, using emotional, cognitive and linguistic features from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis, in combination with affective and rhetorical features from the Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) platform. The results showed that the Random-forest algorithm performed well (F-score=0.799) and that AWA features, such as emotional and reflective rhetorical moves, improved performance.

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Checking It Twice: Does Adding Spelling and Grammar Checkers Improve Essay Quality in an Automated Writing Tutor?

McCarthy

Roscoe

Likens

et al. 2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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The Writing-Pal

Cited by 19 publications

References 16 publications

Writing pal: Feasibility of an intelligent writing strategy tutor in the high school classroom.

Writing pal: Feasibility of an intelligent writing strategy tutor in the high school classroom.

Evaluating Machine Learning Approaches to Classify Pharmacy Students’ Reflective Statements

Checking It Twice: Does Adding Spelling and Grammar Checkers Improve Essay Quality in an Automated Writing Tutor?

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