Jennifer L. Weston

The Development of Writing Proficiency as a Function of Grade Level: A Linguistic Analysis:

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can be distinguished from one another using a number of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication (i.e., word frequency, word concreteness), syntactic complexity (i.e., the number of modifiers per noun phrase), and cohesion (i.e., word overlap, incidence of connectives). The analysis demonstrates that high school and college writers develop linguistic strategies as a function of grade level. Primarily, these writers produce more sophisticated words and more complex sentence structure as grade level increases. In contrast, these writers produce fewer cohesive features in text as a function of grade level. This analysis supports the notion that linguistic development occurs in the later stages of writing development and that this development is primarily related to producing texts that are less cohesive and more elaborate.

Promoting Metacognitive Awareness within a Game-Based Intelligent Tutoring System

Metacognitive awareness has been shown to be a critical skill for academic success. However, students often struggle to regulate this ability during learning tasks. The current study investigates how features designed to promote metacognitive awareness can be built into the game-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) iSTART-2. College students (n=28) interacted with iSTART-2 for one hour, completing lesson videos and practice activities. If students’ performance fell below a minimum threshold during game-based practice, they received a pop-up that alerted them of their poor performance and were subsequently transitioned to a remedial activity. Results revealed that students’ scores in the system improved after they were transitioned (even when they did not complete the remedial activity). This suggests that the pop-up feature in iSTART-2 may indirectly promote metacognitive awareness, thus leading to increased performance. These results provide insight into the potential benefits of real-time feedback designed to promote metacognitive awareness within a game-based learning environment.