The Fourth International Conference on Writing Analytics: Writing Analytics, Data Mining, and Student Success

This conference, held January 12 and 13 in 2017, brought together theorists and researchers from Writing Studies, Predictive Analytics, and Corpus Linguistics to explore the emergence of writing analytics and data mining as a primary concern for academe, both as a business and a methodology for constructing knowledge. Featured speakers reported on new educational data and text mining methods, advances in intelligent tutorial systems and artificial intelligence, pioneering research on machine feedback for formative as opposed to summative commentary, and research on ways to provide more helpful feedback on student work in less time. Participants discussed how scores and comments on writing projects in the freshman year could be used to predict retention and student success. Scholars were invited to speak about ways digital ecologies can measure tool behaviors such as time-on-task, comments and trace patterns can measure intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, and how machines can pitch tutorials to students based on their needs.