CIC researchers are collaborating with the UTS Faculty of Law on a project to teach undergraduate law students how to improve their academic essay writing. Students learn the use of rhetorical structures and discourse markers, which guide the reader through the flow of a text using linguistic cues. They also learn self-assessment and revision skills to apply on their essay writing using several writing tasks guided by an online tool. CIC PhD student Shibani Antonette has developed this online tool called ‘AWA-Tutor’ to facilitate the activity, collect learner data for teaching and research and to provide automated feedback on rhetorical structures based on the Academic Writing Analytics tool (AWA). A short demo of the tool capabilities is below:
This intervention co-designed by researchers and the civil law subject instructor Dr. Phillipa Ryan has been implemented over two semesters in 2017 with about 500 students. Data from the study helps to evaluate the intervention design and automated feedback from the AWA tool for improvements. Some preliminary findings were presented at the UTS Teaching and Learning Forum 2017.
You can find more details in the publication here:
Antonette Shibani, Simon Knight, Simon Buckingham Shum and Philippa Ryan (2017). Design and Implementation of a Pedagogic Intervention Using Writing Analytics. In Proceedings of the 25thInternational Conference on Computers in Education. New Zealand: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.