Written communication is an important skill across academia, the workplace, and civic participation. Effective writing incorporates instantiations of particular text structures - rhetorical moves - that communicate intent to the reader. These rhetorical moves are important across a range of academic styles of writing, including essays and research abstracts, as well as in forms of writing in which one reflects on learning gained through experience. However, learning how to effectively instantiat...
#1Pooja K. Agarwal(WashU: Washington University in St. Louis)H-Index: 15
The development of students’ higher order learning is a critical component of education. For decades, educators and scientists have engaged in an ongoing debate about whether higher order learning can only be enhanced by building a base of factual knowledge (analogous to Bloom’s taxonomy) or whether higher order learning can be enhanced directly by engaging in complex questioning and materials. The relationship between fact learning and higher order learning is often speculated, but empirically ...
Less than it is an individual ability or skill, critical thinking is a dialogic practice people engage in and commit to, initially interactively and then in interiorized form with the other only implicit. An argument depends for its meaning on how others respond. In advancing arguments, well-practiced thinkers anticipate their defeasibility as a consequence of others’ objections, in addition to envisioning their own potential rebuttals. Whether in external or interiorized form, the dialogic proc...
Learning projects are major academic assignments. They benefit from productive self-regulated learning to improve skills for solving information problems of searching for, analyzing, mining and organizing unfamiliar content. Findings from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the “gold standard” for research, are recommended to meet these needs but RCTs poorly serve this purpose. A state-of-the-art learning technology, nStudy, is proposed to support a new approach to learning science and help fil...
#1Weronika Fernando(QMUL: Queen Mary University of London)H-Index: 1
Abstract In higher education, formative academic literacy assessment tends to prioritise the product, i.e. a written text, rather than the writing processes, i.e. an active and focused reading which leads to the development of an evidence-based argument. This paper shifts the emphasis from the written product to the writing processes and investigates the effectiveness of formative academic literacy assessment in facilitating students’ engagement with composing processes and in helping them devel...
#1Christian Stab(Technische Universität Darmstadt)H-Index: 16
#2Iryna Gurevych(Technische Universität Darmstadt)H-Index: 65
In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures. The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and argumentative relations using Integer Linear Programming. We show that our model significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines on two different types of discourse. Moreover, we introduce a novel ...
Central to argument are evidence-based claims, requiring coordination of a claim with evidence bearing on it. We advocate a dialogic approach to developing argument skills and in the work reported here examine the further scaffold of prompts that exemplify functions of evidence in relation to a claim. This scaffold was successful in accelerating the prevalence of evidence-based claims in essays of low-performing middle schoolers compared to participants in the same year-long dialog-based interve...
Last. Stephen Fickas(UO: University of Oregon)H-Index: 23
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Identifying incorrect content (i.e., semantic error) in text is a difficult task because of the ambiguous nature of written natural language and the many factors that can make a statement semantically erroneous. Current methods identify semantic errors in a sentence by determining whether it contradicts the domain to which the sentence belongs. However, because these methods are constructed on expected logic contradictions, they cannot handle new or unexpected semantic errors. In this paper, we ...
ABSTRACTThe present study aimed to identify difficulties in writing at the beginning of educational science programmes in the Finnish Open University by analysing the students’ written argumentation and use of sources at the textual level. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The results showed that many students began their educational studies with weak writing competencies. While many of the problems were directly related to students’ failure to explain the ideas in their...