EDM Workshop: Writing Analytics, Data Mining, & Writing Studies
June 29, 2016, Raleigh, NC, USA
9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2016)
We invite submissions to a pre-conference workshop on Writing Analytics, Data Mining, & Writing Studies at EDM 2016, which will be held at Raleigh, NC on June 29, 2016. This workshop is a precursor to EDM 2016 (The 9th International Conference on Education Data Mining), a leading international forum for high-quality research that leverages data and data science to answer research questions that shed light on the learning process.
The primary goal of this workshop is to facilitate a research community around the topic of large-scale data analysis with a particular focus on writing studies, data mining, and analytics. The workshop hopes to generate cross-disciplinary research among writing program directors and faculty, computational linguists, computer scientists, and educational measurement specialists. This workshop questions ways writing analytics and data mining can be used to improve on existing methods for responding to and assessing student writing. This workshop invites researchers in the domains of data mining, writing analytics, and writing studies to engage in a creative interdisciplinary exploration of how digitally based writing analytics might improve students' cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies as writers, and also provide new analytic tools for assessing this improvement. Workshop participants will be introduced to current trends in data mining and writing analytics. In summary, the workshop will provide an overview of development work on writing analytics and invite participants to brainstorm about ways analytics can improve document critique, peer review, and writing program assessment.
Please share your related research with us. Sample topics may include
- How can data mining and analytics be leveraged to better meet the needs of students and educational institutions?
- What are the best practices for adapting the state-of-the-art data mining approaches to the educational domain, with specific attention to teaching and assessing writing?
- How can researchers detect and assess students' intrapersonal domain characteristics while engaging the writing construct?
- How can researchers detect and assess students' interpersonal domain characteristics while engaging the writing construct?
- What broad cognitive domain characteristics best capture the writing construct, and how are these characteristics modified by task?
- How may the writing construct best be modeled according to cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal domains?
- For assessing writing, automated grading, automated commenting, natural language or textual data processing:
- What are applications of massive parallel computations?
- What are current advances and future directions in the artificial intelligence field?
- What methods, tools or big data platforms are more efficient?
- What are effective pre-processing techniques, e.g. for the Extract/Transform/Load phase?
- What are successful evaluation and validation methods?
- How can data mining and writing analytics inform peer review practices?
- What genres of real-time reporting can meet evidence demands of reliability, validity, and fairness while providing actionable information to students leading to improved writing performance?
- How can researchers visualize writing analytics to make feedback more meaningful for students?
Due Dates
May 1: Paper submissions
May 8: Notification to authors
May 31: Final papers due
Publication & Submission Guidelines
Workshop proceedings will be published on the CEUR Workshop Proceedings site and include all accepted workshop submissions. Submissions should be prepared with EDM's templates: Word, LaTex (zip file) and submitted via EDM 2016's EasyChair.
Full Papers: 6 to 8 pages. Original, substantive, mature and unpublished work.
Short Papers: 3 to 5 pages. This includes early stage, less developed works in progress.
Posters, Demos: 2 pages.
Workshop Organizers
- Val Ross, University of Pennsylvania, Director of Critical Writing Program, https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/valerie-ross
- Alex Rudniy, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-rudniy-4698ba2b
- Dave Eubanks, Assistant Vice President, Furman University, https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-eubanks
- Joe Moxley, University of South Florida, Director of First-Year Composition, http://joemoxley.org
Program Committee
- Chris Anson, North Carolina State University, Director of Campus Writing and Speaking Program, http://ncsu.academia.edu/ChrisAnson
- Laura Aull, Wake Forest University, Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics, http://wfu.academia.edu/LauraAull
- Denise Comer, Duke, Director of Writing, https://www.linkedin.com/in/denise-comer-2407666?
- Norbert Elliot, NJIT, Professor Emeritus, https://www.linkedin.com/in/norbert-elliot-1712a89
- Ann Gere, University of Michigan, Director of Writing, Sweetland Writing Center, http://www.soe.umich.edu/people/profile/anne_ruggles_gere/
- Larry Hall, USF, Distinguished University Professor, Computer Science, http://morden.cse.usf.edu/ailab/hall.html
- Asko Kauppinen, Malmö University, The Writing Unit, Director of Research, http://forskning.mah.se/en/id/imaska
- Andrew Krumm, SRI International < https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-krumm-5aa631a?
- Roberto Martinez-Maldonado, University of Technology, Postdoctoral Research Associate, http://www.uts.edu.au/staff/roberto.martinez-maldonado
- Alla Rozovskaya, Virginia Tech, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alla-rozovskaya-08908a54
- Djuddah A.J. Leijen, University of Tartu, Head, Centre for Academic Writing and Communication, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Djuddah_Leijen
- Ravi Rao, Fairleigh Dickinson University, https://www.linkedin.com/in/drravirao
- Anna Wärnsby, Malmö University, The Writing Unit, Director of Research, http://forskning.mah.se/en/id/imanwa
Background
Current measures of coaching and assessing student writing, while time consuming and well intentioned, fail to provide students with the feedback they need to improve as writers and peer reviewers. After all, current assessments of students' writing competencies have identified problems with students' reading, research, collaboration, and communication competencies: in the U.S. the College Board determined that 57% of SAT takers do not qualify as college ready; the ACT found 31% of high school graduates "did not meet any of the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks"; the NAEP Writing Report found 73% of 12th graders received scores of Below Basic or Basic as opposed to Proficient or Advanced in 2011; the Programme for International Student Assessment concluded that the U.S. literacy rate fell from 10th to 20th in the latest study on global rankings.
Digital tools such as My Reviewers that enable instructors to grade and comment on student papers and peer reviews online are transforming how instructors and students critique documents and have the potential to transform how writing and writing programs are assessed. Beyond profoundly altering how faculty and students respond to writing, these tools aggregate e-portfolios, facilitate distributive evaluation, and archive data that allow researchers to mine texts and map student outcomes in order to produce analytics that inform users, researchers, and administrators. Rather than limit assessment to cognitive measures, these toolsets facilitate gathering authentic assessment information about students' intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies.