Kommalage M. Analytical essay writing: a new activity introduced to a traditional curriculum. Adv Physiol Educ 36: 54–57, 2012; doi:10.1152/advan.00050.2011.—Medical students following a traditional curriculum get few opportunities to engage in activities such as a literature search, scientific writing, and active and collaborative learning. An analytical essay writing activity (AEWA) in physio...

the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization have made teaching it a challenging task for a large group of practitioners in academic setting. one such feature of academic writing susceptible to cultural mentalities is metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one of the important rhetorical aspects in the writing p...

Research on automated essay scoring (AES) indicates that computer-generated essay ratings are comparable to human ratings. However, despite investigations into the accuracy and reliability of AES scores, less attention has been paid to the feedback delivered to the students. This paper presents a method developers can use to quickly evaluate the usability of an automated feedback system prior t...

Natural language processing and statistical methods were used to identify linguistic features associated with the quality of student-generated paragraphs. Linguistic features were assessed using Coh-Metrix. The resulting computational models demonstrated small to medium effect sizes for predicting paragraph quality: introduction quality r2 = .25, body quality r2 = .10, and conclusion quality r2...

The Writing Pal is an intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy training. A large part of its artificial intelligence resides in the natural language processing algorithms to assess essay quality and guide feedback to students. Because writing is often highly nuanced and subjective, the development of these algorithms must consider a broad array of linguistic, rhetorical, and c...