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Writing analytics across essay tasks with different cognitive load demands

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conference contribution
posted on 2021-03-31, 11:57 authored by Eduardo Oliveira, Rianne Conijn, Paula de Barba, Kelly Trezise, Menno van Zaanen, Gregor Kennedy
Essay tasks are a widely used form of assessment in higher education. Writing analytics can assist with challenges related to using essay tasks at scale and to identifying different issues in academic integrity. In this paper, we combined two techniques to investigate how students’ writing analytics varied across essay tasks with different cognitive load, considering both their typing behavior (i.e., writing process) and writing style (i.e., writing product). We also examined their relationship across these essay tasks. Findings showed that writing processes change across tasks with different cognitive load: when cognitive load increases, the interword intervals (indicator of planning and/or reviewing processes) increased, the burst length (indicator of translation processes) decreased, and the number of revisions per minute (indicator of reviewing processes) decreased. In contrast to the relation between the writing process and cognitive load, the relation between the writing product and cognitive load was found less clear. The results showed small and mixed effects of the tasks differing in cognitive load on the different writing product metrics. Hence, although the writing product follows from the writing process, the relation between cognitive load and the writing product and process appears to be less straightforward.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

ASCILITE 2020 Conference Proceedings

Pages

60 - 70

Source

ASCILITE 2020 Conference - ASCILITE’s First Virtual Conference. 37th International Conference on Innovation, Practice and Research in the use of Educational Technologies in Tertiary Education

Publisher

Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by ASCILITE under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Publication date

2020-11-30

Copyright date

2020

Language

  • en

Editor(s)

Sue Gregory; Steve Warburton; Mitchell Parkes

Location

University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia (Virtual)

Event dates

30th November 2020 - 1st December 2020

Depositor

Dr Kelly Trezise. Deposit date: 28 March 2021

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