With the increasing use of mobile phones among young people, there is growing public concern about possible detrimental effects of digital writing on learners' literacy and language skills. We ask whether and to what extent nonstandard forms typical of spoken Hebrew and of digital communication are also found in the formal writing of high-school…

This paper introduces "CTutor", an automated writing evaluation (AWE) tool for detecting breakdowns in local coherence and reports on a study that applies it to the writing of Chinese L2 English learners. The program is based on Centering theory (CT), a theory of local coherence and salience. The principles of CT are first introduced and…

This study examined the efficacy of pentop computers on the written expression of three secondary students with mild disabilities. A multiple-probe design was used to establish pentop computers as a potentially effective tool for increasing the quality and quantity of written expression. Each student learned to use the pentop computer and the…

This study investigates the potential of a software tool based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer, McNamara, Dennis, & Kintsch, 2007) to automatically evaluate complex German texts. A sample of N = 94 German university students provided written answers to questions that involved a high amount of analytical reasoning and evaluation.…

Essays are an important measure of complex learning, but pronouns can confound an author's intended meaning for both readers and text analysis software. This descriptive investigation considers the effect of pronouns on a computer-based text analysis approach, "ALA-Reader," which uses students' essays as the data source for deriving individual and…

Developers of the Intelligent Essay Assessor claim that it saves time in evaluating college students' essays and improves the assessment. This and the growing number of other automated grading programs use the same technologies that make computer-based tutoring possible. Many academics remain skeptical of grading technologies, citing the…

This paper reports on research that explores the use of detection software in the fight against plagiarism. The aim of the research was to determine if the true incidence rate of plagiarism could be found for a cohort of Higher Education students. The paper outlines the problems and issues when attempting this. In addition, this report highlights…

Assesses the utility of the analyses within the "Writer's Workbench" (an advanced text editor) range. Compares professional prose with first-year college student essays, using readability, sentence variety, sentence structure, parts of speech, vocabulary, and usage. (MS)