TY - GEN
T1 - Does topic matter? topic influences on linguistic and rubric-based evaluation of writing
AU - Dowell, Nia
AU - D'Mello, Sidney K.
AU - Mills, Caitlin
AU - Graesser, Art
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Although writing is an integral part of education, there is limited knowledge on how assigned topics influence writing quality both in terms of micro-level linguistic features and macro-level subjective evaluations by human judges. We addressed this question by conducting a study in which 44 students wrote short essays on three different topics: traditional academic-based topics such as the ones used in standardized tests, personal emotional experiences, and socially charged topics. The essays were automatically scored on five linguistic dimensions (narrativity, situation model cohesion, referential cohesion, syntactic complexity, and word abstractness). They were also manually scored by human judges based on a rubric focusing on macro-level dimensions (i.e., introduction, thesis, and conclusion). The results indicated that topic-related differences were observed on both the rubric-based and linguistic assessments, although there were weak relationships between these two measures.
AB - Although writing is an integral part of education, there is limited knowledge on how assigned topics influence writing quality both in terms of micro-level linguistic features and macro-level subjective evaluations by human judges. We addressed this question by conducting a study in which 44 students wrote short essays on three different topics: traditional academic-based topics such as the ones used in standardized tests, personal emotional experiences, and socially charged topics. The essays were automatically scored on five linguistic dimensions (narrativity, situation model cohesion, referential cohesion, syntactic complexity, and word abstractness). They were also manually scored by human judges based on a rubric focusing on macro-level dimensions (i.e., introduction, thesis, and conclusion). The results indicated that topic-related differences were observed on both the rubric-based and linguistic assessments, although there were weak relationships between these two measures.
KW - Coh-Metrix
KW - Coherence
KW - Cohesion
KW - Linguistics
KW - Writing quality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79959313472&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79959313472&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-21869-9_66
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-21869-9_66
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:79959313472
SN - 9783642218682
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 450
EP - 452
BT - Artificial Intelligence in Education - 15th International Conference, AIED 2011
T2 - 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2011
Y2 - 28 June 2011 through 1 July 2011
ER -