To date, very little research on L2 peer review of L2 essay composition has focused on the issue of whether the choice of L1 or L2 use in the peer review process facilitates or hinders students' transmission and reception of productive commentary on their essay drafts. This study was designed to ascertain the impact of language choice in written…

The current paper reports an empirical study of asynchronous online group review of argumentative essays among nine English as foreign language (EFL) Arab university learners joining English in their first, second, and third years at the institution. In investigating online interactions, commenting patterns, and how the students facilitate text…

Students' critical thinking skills are very important in the 21st century. Learning strategies can play a role in enhancing students' critical thinking skills in the Nutrition and Health lecture. The results of a survey in 2013 showed that the implementation of learning strategies had not given students the opportunity to practice their critical…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between a social justice curriculum and the dispositions of graduate students enrolled in an online pre-service school principal preparation program. Data Collection: Students were asked to write reflective essays before the course began and again after the course was over discussing their…

The interplay between student and teacher expectations about the requirements for successful learning in higher education (HE) can impact on successful student outcomes. This study aims to identify and understand the expectations that first year university students have towards essay production during their acculturation to HE. By examining the…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of assessment method (essays vs. examinations) and instruction method (seminars vs. lectures) on student perceptions of the fairness of the assessment process. Department-specific combinations of these factors give a unique profile to the assessment process and to the way students interact with…

Automated essay scoring (AES) generally computes essay scores as a function of macrofeatures derived from a set of microfeatures extracted from the text using natural language processing (NLP). In the "e-rater"® automated scoring engine, developed at "Educational Testing Service" (ETS) for the automated scoring of essays, each…

For the last century, the quality of large-scale assessment in the United States has been undermined by narrow educational theory and hindered by limitations in technology. As a result, poor assessment practices have encouraged low-level instructional practices that disparately affect students from the most disadvantaged communities and schools.…

Nurturing critical thinking (CT) has been acknowledged as a core objective of tertiary education, and drawn attention from academia of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in China. The thrust of the present study was to determine the association between CT and EFL argumentative writing among Chinese undergraduates. To this end, 110…

This study used a single-subject, multiple-baseline across participants design to replicate previous research on the functional relation between the use of a mobile-based graphic organizer (MBGO) and the persuasive writing performance of middle school students with high incidence disabilities. The current study extended the previous research by…

This research investigates three topics related to human capital and innovation in the United States. The primary objective of the first chapter is to examine the influence of natural amenities on student migration decisions using institution-level data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Integrated Postsecondary Education Data…

Automated scoring models were trained and evaluated for the essay task in the "Praxis I"® writing test. Prompt-specific and generic "e-rater"® scoring models were built, and evaluation statistics, such as quadratic weighted kappa, Pearson correlation, and standardized differences in mean scores, were examined to evaluate the…

Students training for clinical careers must acquire skills for teaching clients, their families, and fellow professionals. Guidelines for training programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders (Speech-Language Pathology), however, do not currently include standards for pedagogy. The aim of this study was to measure changes in undergraduate…

Since Carolyn Miller's Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has facilitated analysis of how typified rhetorical actions constitute the contexts and communities in which writers write. In first-year writing (FYW) specifically, RGS approaches have focused on macro-level textual constructs, like the audience and…

Focusing on noun phrase complexity in writing, this study adopted Biber, Gray and Poonpon's (2011) hypothesized developmental stages to investigate the academic writing of Thai and native English university students by comparing their argumentative English essays as concerns their usage of noun modification. Prenominal modifiers and postnominal…