One of the most significant and yet often overlooked challenges for university students is decoding what their instructors expect from their assignments. Better understanding those expectations and the vocabulary and grammar needed to achieve them are the motivations behind this investigation. Eleven experienced instructors within an Australian…

Essay writing is crucial for students as it fosters effective communication and improves critical and analytical thinking. This study investigates the impact of scaffolding techniques on Malay language essay writing proficiency among year 5 students in Malaysia. Based on Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory, scaffolding offers structured support that…

The provision of feedback is widely practised as part of formative assessment. However, studies that examine the impact of feedback are usually from the teachers' perspective, focusing on why and how they provide feedback. Fewer studies examine feedback from the students' perspective, especially in the way they experience, make sense of and take…

Little is known about the role of prompts to help learners solve ill-structured learning problems. Instructors do not devote adequate time to formulate pedagogically useful prompts, and the usefulness of different types of prompt is unclear. This mixed-methods study examined the role of argumentative prompts in the writing of essays based on…

The genre-based approach (GBA) to teaching second language (L2) writing follows the stages of establishing context, modelling, analysis, joint construction, and independent construction. The passage from joint construction to independent construction in the GBA requires scaffolding. Thus, studies on GBA suggest teacher support in independent…

In large lecture courses, it can be challenging to imagine assessing student learning in ways other than multiple-choice exams and traditional point-based grading. Inspired by major pedagogical principles shared by Maria Montessori and Thomas Jefferson and supported by current understandings of effective teaching, assessment was reimagined in a…

Intelligent systems of essay grading constitute important tools for educational technologies. They can significantly replace the manual scoring efforts and provide instructional feedback as well. These systems typically include two main parts: a feature extractor and an automatic grading model. The latter is generally based on computational and…

This study explores the writing quality of two AI chatbots, OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The research assesses the quality of the generated texts based on five essay models using the T.E.R.A. software, focusing on ease of understanding, readability, and reading levels using the Flesch-Kincaid formula. Thirty essays were generated, 15 from…

This corpus-based multifactorial study delves deeper into the well-known alternation between bare and full infinitive complements, specifically regarding the "help" concordances. It extends the line of research to learners' language productions with a focus on comparing and contrasting the probabilistic grammatical knowledge reflected in…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing applied in education. Solutions vary from handcrafted linguistic features to large Transformer-based models, implying a significant effort in feature extraction and model implementation. We introduce a novel Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) pipeline…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing applied in education. Solutions vary from handcrafted linguistic features to large Transformer-based models, implying a significant effort in feature extraction and model implementation. We introduce a novel Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) pipeline…

Creative problem-solving skills are essential for navigating complex, non-routine challenges, enabling individuals to create unique goals, execute innovative procedures and generate original outcomes. While the link between metacognitive skills and the creativity of outcomes was established only recently, further exploration is required to…

Technological Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have Brought forth the Potential for Models to Assist in Academic Writing. However, Concerns Regarding the Accuracy, Reliability, and Impact of AI in Academic Writing have been Raised. This Study Examined the Capabilities of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art AI Language Model, in Writing an American…

Written correction feedback (WCF) has been a part of the field of English as a foreign language (EFL) writing for decades. Much research has been conducted on WCF in various contexts. In Yemen, it seems that WCF has still not been touched. This study explores Yemeni EFL undergraduates' attitudes on having their written essays corrected using a…

This study investigated the impact of Google Docs on the academic writing improvement of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Conducted over a 13-week period during the 2022/23 academic year at an Ethiopian university, the research examined how this digital tool affects writing quality and student perceptions. Utilizing a sequential…