This essay analyzes the educational significance of the metaphysical novel, that is, how it can be used to educate ourselves and our students. Mordechai Gordon begins by describing the nature of the metaphysical novel while contrasting it to "pure" philosophy and theory building. Gordon also situates Beauvoir's insights in the broader…

In this manuscript, I lift Black feminisms as a methodological intervention on a holistic meaning-making theory and its relationship to anti-Blackness. Specifically, I employed a Black feminist literary criticism, which presumes that Black people have cultivated living and survival practices throughout their history in the United States. I…

In this article, we argue that automated scoring engines should be transparent and construct relevant--that is, as much as is currently feasible. Many current automated scoring engines cannot achieve high degrees of scoring accuracy without allowing in some features that may not be easily explained and understood and may not be obviously and…

This paper offers readings of three examples from a photo-essay project undertaken in 2022 by a group of Year 7 pupils in Berlin. Many of the photo-essays centred on locations like schools, parks and shops, but also included places of worship, the graves of ancestors and evidence of family ties in other cities. Mirroring the practices of the…

There is valuable scholarship on the importance of teaching narratives in the FYC classroom, but none does so through the frame of vulnerability. This paper explores, through an IRB approved case study, how composition teachers can best guide students to write powerful and well-crafted personal narratives to ignite students' own voices, histories,…

E-learning is gradually gaining prominence in higher education, with universities enlarging provision and more students getting enrolled. The effectiveness of automated essay scoring (AES) is thus holding a strong appeal to universities for managing an increasing learning interest and reducing costs associated with human raters. The growth in…

Very few parts of the world have legislation that prohibits the operation or the promotion of contract cheating services. This means that commercial companies providing such services can formally register and operate in most countries. If a student enters into an agreement with a contract cheating provider, what rights do they have to change their…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

In this article, I engage the psychoanalytic writings of Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Wilfred Bion, who proffer maternal reverie -- an intimate intersubjective communication between the mother and infant -- as an early model for the psychosomatic drifts of form and thought experienced in the analytic encounter. As a way to frame these…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) tools aim to improve the efficiency and consistency of essay scoring by using machine learning algorithms. In the existing research work on this topic, most researchers agree that human-automated score agreement remains the benchmark for assessing the accuracy of machine-generated scores. To measure the performance of…

The five-paragraph essay is highly controversial, and yet it has also been a useful format for composition. In this essay we explain why, despite its limits, students need to go along with the format to make what use and get what advantage of it. We then demonstrate that valuing the philosophical, historical, cultural, and educational backgrounds…

The proliferation of large language models represents a paradigm shift in the landscape of automated essay scoring (AES) systems, fundamentally elevating their accuracy and efficacy. This study presents an extensive examination of large language models, with a particular emphasis on the transformative influence of transformer-based models, such as…

Our organic chemistry course enrolls students from the medicine major. As future healthcare professionals, medical students should also take on the responsibility of publicizing scientific knowledge related to human health. Therefore, starting from 2020, we have designed an assignment that tasked students with writing a popular science essay for…

A well-written argumentative essay requires a thorough analysis of the topic with sufficient supporting evidence. However, obtaining information on the topic, summarizing the reading materials, and then presenting them in the form of an argumentative essay can be a challenging task, especially for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners.…

The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is profoundly shaping our society. Among various AI tools, ChatGPT stands out for its user-friendly nature and wide accessibility to the public. However, despite their countless potential benefits, these tools also face significant challenges, especially in sensitive areas like Education. In this…