Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

Synthesis writing is widely taught across domains and serves as an important means of assessing writing ability, text comprehension, and content learning. Synthesis writing differs from other types of writing in terms of both cognitive and task demands because it requires writers to integrate information across source materials. However, little is…

The current study examined the degree to which the quality and characteristics of students' essays could be modeled through dynamic natural language processing analyses. Undergraduate students (n = 131) wrote timed, persuasive essays in response to an argumentative writing prompt. Recurrent patterns of the words in the essays were then analyzed…