Much of the research that has examined the writing knowledge of school-age students has relied on interviews to ascertain this information, which is problematic because interviews may underestimate breadth and depth of writing knowledge, require lengthy interactions with participants, and do not permit a direct evaluation of a prescribed array of…

"Biometrics" are physical or behavioral human characteristics that can be used to identify a person. It is widely known that keystroke or typing dynamics for short, fixed texts (e.g., passwords) could serve as a behavioral biometric. In this study, we investigate whether keystroke data from essay responses can lead to a reliable…

In language education, teaching a language as a foreign language is an emerging field compared to teaching it as a mother tongue. However, the experiences obtained in mother tongue education are adapted to teaching a language as a foreign language with various amendments and therefore progress in this field has been achieved. Council of Europe…

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and…

Presents a systematic strategy for examining topic-related knowledge prior to writing. Discusses a theory-based rationale for the measure, a formalized method for analyzing topic knowledge, and a guide for using the instrument. (JD)

Notes how current writing research models remain of limited usefulness to the study of writing development because they do not explain important conditions such as coherence, nor do they define the systematic relationships in writing contexts. (RL)

A study examined how teachers help students to write with greater precision. Subjects, 160 freshman students, wrote a single sentence describing a wordless Peanuts cartoon. They were asked to express specific semantic relationships (sequence/cotemporality, intention/instrument, and intention/enablement) between the actions in two contrasting…

Describes RECOMP, a computer program developed at Louisiana State University which provides researchers with new ways of studying the composing process by analyzing and charting elements of the process as it occurs. Types of data gathered, RECOMP's place in current composition research and potential value of studies using RECOMP are also…

Since attention to the issue of writing assessment is new, research and theory are described as still widely scattered among fields of inquiry and differing perspectives. The integration of available knowledge into a viable framework is recommended to prescribe current practice and determine future research. In a domain-referenced view of…

Examines how school writing tasks (notetaking, answering study questions, and essay writing) interact with three measures of learning (recall, concept application, and gain in passage-specific knowledge). (HOD)

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

To understand and describe a developmental learning progression of choices students make in forming chains of relationships in their narrative texts, a study used the Cohesive Harmony Index to measure cohesion in children's written narratives. Data were obtained from 36 grade school children at intervals of four months over the students' first…