Title
OpenEssayist: a supply and demand learning analytics tool for drafting academic essays
Abstract
This paper focuses on the use of a natural language analytics engine to provide feedback to students when preparing an essay for summative assessment. OpenEssayist is a real-time learning analytics tool, which operates through the combination of a linguistic analysis engine that processes the text in the essay, and a web application that uses the output of the linguistic analysis engine to generate the feedback. We outline the system itself and present analysis of observed patterns of activity as a cohort of students engaged with the system for their module assignments. We report a significant positive correlation between the number of drafts submitted to the system and the grades awarded for the first assignment. We can also report that this cohort of students gained significantly higher overall grades than the students in the previous cohort, who had no access to OpenEssayist. As a system that is content free, OpenEssayist can be used to support students working in any domain that requires the writing of essays.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2723576.2723599
LAK
Keywords
Field
DocType
design,automated formative feedback,measurement,general,academic essay writing,online distance education,educational performance,natural language processing,performance
Data science,Learning analytics,Computer science,Summative assessment,Natural language,Mathematics education,Positive correlation,Web application,Analytics,Supply and demand,Linguistic analysis
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.71
5
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Denise Whitelock112529.26
Alison Twiner251.38
John T. E. Richardson351.05
Debora Field492.51
Stephen Pulman545038.31