Background: Researchers interested in quantitative measures of student "success" in writing cannot control completely for contextual factors which are local and site-based (i.e., in context of a specific instructor's writing classroom at a specific institution). (In)ability to control for curriculum in studies of student writing…

Low retention rates in college is a policy concern for US postsecondary institutions, and writing is a critical competency for college (Graham, 2019). This paper describes an exploratory writing analytics study at six 4-year universities aimed at gaining insights about the relationship between college retention and writing. Findings suggest that…

Background: This exploratory writing analytics study uses argumentative writing samples from two performance contexts--standardized writing assessments and university English course writing assignments--to compare: (1) linguistic features in argumentative writing; and (2) relationships between linguistic characteristics and academic performance…

Writing achievement is a complex skill set as characterized by the sociocognitive writing framework, including writing domain knowledge (e.g., sentence structure), general cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking) and intra- (e.g., interest) and interpersonal (e.g., collaboration) subfactors. During students' postsecondary careers, they need to…

Writing is a challenge and a potential obstacle for students in U.S. 4-year postsecondary institutions lacking prerequisite writing skills. This study aims to address the research question: Is there a relationship between specific features (analytics) in coursework writing and broader success predictors? Knowledge about this relationship could…

Collection and analysis of students' writing samples on a large scale is a part of the research agenda of the emerging writing analytics community that promises to deliver an unprecedented insight into characteristics of student writing. Yet with a large scale often comes variability of contexts in which the samples were produced--different…

The integration of subject matter learning with reading and writing skills takes place in multiple ways. Students learn to read, interpret, and write texts in the discipline-relevant genres. However, writing can be used not only for the purposes of practice in professional communication, but also as an opportunity to reflect on the learned…

Genre serves as a useful lens to investigate the range of evidence derived from automated writing evaluation (AWE). To support construct-relevant systems used for writing instruction and assessment, two investigations were conducted that focused on postsecondary writing requirements and faculty perceptions of student writing proficiency. Survey…

No significant body of research examines writing achievement and the specific skills and knowledge in the writing domain for postsecondary (college) students in the U.S., even though many at-risk students lack the prerequisite writing skills required to persist in their education. This paper addresses this gap through a novel…

We introduce a cognitive framework for measuring reading comprehension that includes the use of novel summary-writing tasks. We derive NLP features from the holistic rubric used to score the summaries written by students for such tasks and use them to design a preliminary, automated scoring system. Our results show that the automated approach…

This study examines the relation between essay length and holistic scores assigned to Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]) essays by e-rater[R], the automated essay scoring system developed by ETS. Results show that an early version of the system, e-rater99, accounted for little variance in human reader scores beyond that which…

E-rater[R] has been used by the Educational Testing Service for automated essay scoring since 1999. This paper describes a new version of e-rater (V.2) that is different from other automated essay scoring systems in several important respects. The main innovations of e-rater V.2 are a small, intuitive, and meaningful set of features used for…