Learning Analytics for Writing Competencies

Students are expected to be able to write effectively across a wide range of topics, yet seem to have difficulty achieving such a level of mastery. Despite this, effective writing skills continue to be important in school, in the [Page 454]workplace, and in social contexts. To address this gap, many schools and universities have developed specialized techniques to help improve writing skills. These range from providing writing support from peers, professional tutors, or reviewers, to providing explicit strategy instruction, to requiring all students to take a single course focused on the basics of writing, to integrating writing-intensive courses into the disciplines. In this way, students have multiple exposures to writing techniques. However, given the volume of data generated, it can be difficult to assess the impact of such techniques. Advances in technology may provide new techniques for improving writing skills and allow collection and analysis of data collected through those techniques. This entry provides an overview of the data generated by learners in a digital writing environment, describes the writing process, and examines the ways in which learning analytics can be used to strengthen writing skills.

Writing is a goal-oriented activity that involves a range of related processes, such as planning, translating, and reviewing. Planning involves setting goals, generating ideas, and organizing those ideas to fit the goals. Whether writers use pen and paper, laptop computers, or mobile devices, translating converts plans into formal text. A number of technology solutions, such as automatic spelling and grammar checkers, are already widely available to help students produce higher quality writing. The importance of review processes is often underestimated by students, who see it as involving either the correction of minor errors, such as typos, or as evidence that the writer’s work is poor. Yet, most reviewing activities fall somewhere between these two extremes. Skilled writers often switch back and forth across all three major processes—planning, translating, and reviewing—as they build and refine their texts. This natural switching complicates attempts to study writing by making it difficult to isolate individual processes.

In addition to drawing on a range of processes and resources, writing activities also take place within a context. The typical in-school writing assignment requires learners to work independently and submit their text to a one-person audience—the teacher. With the introduction of technology in the classroom, the social context of academic writing is changing rapidly. Now, students frequently work with peers across all writing processes, and written work may be published to the whole class or even to more public audiences through the use of social media. As learners become more used to writing collaboratively, there is great potential to use technologies designed to facilitate collaboration and the sharing of information as tools to help students improve their writing.

Mixed initiatives is a technique that allows the gathering of data on a learner’s interaction with the writing system, creation of statistical and rule-based assessments, and use of these assessments to automatically and proactively offer feedback to the learner in real time. In addition to traditional academic performance data, mixed-initiative systems collect a range of learning-process data that are not easily observed or recorded by the instructor. For example, such learning-process data may include information on the context in which learners correct grammar, where the context includes the learner’s cognitive capacity (e.g., working memory capacity and self-regulatory capacity) to make the correction, the emotional states of the learner before and after the correction was made (e.g., confused state or stressed state), the social and personal study obligations of the learner (e.g., role undertaken in a study group), and instructional constraints placed on the learner (e.g., submission deadline and assessment rubrics).

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