This paper adopts an “advice for action” approach to feedback in educational practice: addressing how provision of “hints” to participants before they write academic essays can support their understanding and performance in essay-writing tasks. We explored differences in performance by type of hint, and whether there was a transfer of better performance in subsequent essays. Fifty participants ...

Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend ...

The Intelligent Essay Assessor is commercial software that grades essays as accurately as skilled human graders. It was used to critique senior officers’ papers in both the Army’s and Air Force’s Command and General Staff Colleges. The Army Research Institute has supported development of this software, which understands the meaning of written essays. Automatic essay scoring is well-suited to di...

introduction: medical students should be familiar with the end of life ethical issues and its considerations. for teaching end of life care to medical students, literature is a source of excellent narratives of patients with experiences of terminally ill condition in their journey through suffering and one of the most favourite bioethics literature readings has been the death of ivan ilych by t...

We describe in this paper an automated method for assessing local coherence in short argumentative essays. We use ideas from Centering Theory to measure local coherence of essays’ paragraphs and compare it to human judgments on one analytical feature of essay quality called Continuity. Paragraphs which correspond to a discourse segment in our work and which are dominated by one prominent concep...

This selection of essays brings to prominence an approach to semantics that has so far been little publicized and accessible only with special effort. Even though the essays have all been published previously, many of them were scattered in out of the way places such as conference proceedings. Bringing them together between two covers encourages reading them as contributing to one goal: the dev...

Educational assessment applications, as well as other natural-language interfaces, need some mechanism for validating user responses. If the input provided to the system is infelicitous or uncooperative, the proper response may be to simply reject it, to route it to a bin for special processing, or to ask the user to modify the input. If problematic user input is instead handled as if it were t...