Idea Generation in Student Writing: Computational Assessments and Links to Successful Writing
نویسندگان
چکیده
Idea generation is an important component of most major theories of writing. However, few studies have linked idea generation in writing samples to assessments of writing quality or examined links between linguistic features in a text and idea generation. This study uses human ratings of idea generation, such as idea fluency, idea flexibility, idea originality, and idea elaboration, to analyze the extent to which idea generation relates to human judgments of essay quality in a corpus of college student essays. In conjunction with this analysis, linguistic features extracted from the essays are used to develop a predictive model of idea generation to further understand relations between the language features in an essay and the idea generation scores assigned to that essay. The results indicate that essays rated as containing a greater number of ideas that were flexible, original, and elaborated were judged to be of higher quality. Two of these features (elaboration and originality) were significant predictors of essay quality scores in a regression analysis that explained 33% of the variance in human scores. The results also indicate that 1Department of Applied Linguistics/ESL, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA 2Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada 3Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Corresponding Author: Scott A. Crossley, Department of Applied Linguistics/ESL, Georgia State University, 25 Park Place, Suite 1500, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. Email: [email protected] 650178WCXXXX10.1177/0741088316650178Written CommunicationCrossley et al. research-article2016
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