Collaborative Review in Writing Analytics: N-Gram Analysis of Instructor and Student Comments

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of n-gram analysis to analyze instructor and student comments elicited within My Reviewers, a web-based learning environment. Shown to be informative in a wide variety of applications, n-gram analysis is of interest in determining concept proliferation in topics, purposes, terminologies, and rubrics used in writing courses. As the present study demonstrates, unigram, bigram, digram, trigram, fourgram, and fivegram analytic methods reveal important information about instructor and student use of concepts; in turn, such analysis holds the potential to lead to precise and actionable revision behaviors.