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...

This paper describes a deployed educational technology application: the Criterion Online Essay Evaluation Service, a web-based system that provides automated scoring and evaluation of student essays. Criterion has two complementary applications: E-rater, an automated essay scoring system and Critique Writing Analysis Tools , a suite of programs that detect errors in grammar, usage, and mechani...

This paper describes a deployed educational technology application: the Criterion Online Essay Evaluation Service, a web-based system that provides automated scoring and evaluation of student essays. Criterion has two complementary applications: E-rater, an automated essay scoring system and Critique Writing Analysis Tools , a suite of programs that detect errors in grammar, usage, and mechani...

technology application: the Criterion Online Essay Evaluation Service, a web-based system that provides automated scoring and evaluation of student essays. Criterion has two complementary applications: (1) Critique Writing Analysis Tools, a suite of programs that detect errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics, that identify discourse elements in the essay, and that recognize potentially undesir...

Although freewriting strategies are commonly taught in composition courses, there have been few empirical studies on freewriting. We address this gap by examining effects of prior writing skills (as measured by a pre-write essay), freewriting training, text-box size (1, 10, 20 lines), and repetitive writing on freewriting quality. Participants watched an agent-based vicarious learning freewriti...

One of the promises of web-based education is to help students take control of their learning pace as the basic requirement of language learning is being life-long. The purpose of the present study was to find out which of the e-tools -- weblogs, wikis, or podcasts -- can better help EFL learners excel in their writing skill. To this end, 156 Iranian sophomore students majoring in English and s...

Advanced writing skills are an important aspect of academic performance as well as of subsequent work-related performance. However, American students rarely attain advanced scores on assessments of writing skills (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2002). In order to achieve higher levels of writing performance, the working memory demands of writing processes should be reduced so that...