Using machine learning to assess human writing is both an interesting challenge and can potentially make quality education more accessable. Using a dataset of essays written for standardized tests, we trained different models using word features, per-essay statistics, and metrics of similarity and coherence between essays and documents. Within a single prompt, the models are able to make predic...

Linguistic properties of writing prompts have been shown to influence the writing patterns contained in student essays. The majority of previous research on these prompt-based effects has focused on the lexical and syntactic properties of writing prompts and essays. The current study expands this research by investigating the effects of prompt cohesion on the cohesive features of student essays...

This work investigates whether the development of ideas in writing can be captured by graph properties derived from the text. Focusing on student essays, we represent the essay as a graph, and encode a variety of graph properties including PageRank as features for modeling essay scores related to quality of development. We demonstrate that our approach improves on a stateof-the-art system on th...

Essays are frequently used as a medium for teaching and evaluating argumentation skills. Recently, there has been interest in diagrammatic outlining as a replacement to the written outline that often precedes essay writing. This paper presents a preliminary approach for automatically identifying diagram ontology elements in essays, and demonstrates its positive correlation with expert scores of...

Assessing student understanding and extending learning beyond the face-to-face or synchronous online lesson is commonly done with use of discussion forums. However, challenge reported by tutors higher education has always been lack active participation critical engagement students unless task graded formally. Researchers have investigating various approaches to facilitate effective experiences ...

My job requires me to read and critique papers in evolutionary biology almost every day, so it’s understandable to say that seldom do I want to spend my evenings reading more evolutionary biology. This book is the rare exception. In ‘In the light of evolution...’, Jonathan Losos has assembled a remarkably accessible, highly readable, informative and entertaining series of 17 essays by prominent...

This thesis, which consists of three essays, uses empirical methods to study questions in criminal procedure and employment antidiscrimination law. The first chapter measures the consequences for offenders of expanding constitutional criminal jury trial rights. I study the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000), which extended beyond-a-reasonable-doubt jury factfindi...

Learning and reasoning from multiple documents requires students to employ the skills of sourcing (i.e., attending to and citing sources) and information integration (i.e., making connections among content from different sources). Sourcer's Apprentice Intelligent Feedback mechanism (SAIF) is a tool for providing students with automatic and immediate feedback on their use of these skills during ...