Designing and testing visual representations of draft essays for Higher Education Students

Designing and Testing Visual Representations of Draft Essays for

Higher Education Students

Denise Whitelock , Debora Field

, Stephen Pulman, John Richardson ,

Institute of Educational Technology – The Open University

Department of Computer Science – University of Oxford

Learning Analytics and Student Feedback

• Assessment drives learning (Rowntree, 1987)

• Communicating assessment in a meaningful way

• What, when and How?

DMW LAK Workshop March 2014

SAFeSEAProfessor Denise WhitelockProfessor John Richardson

Professor Stephen Pulman

An automated tool supporting

online writing and

assessmentof essays providing

accurate targeted feedback

SAFeSEA: Supportive Automated Feedback for Short Essay Answers http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/safesea/



Grand Challenge representing analysis that can be readily understood

Feedback to prompt Self Reflection

• Analysis must prompt “Advice for Action”

• Self reflective discourse with computer feedback

• Visual representation of feedback can open a discourse between tutor and student

• Prompt peer to peer discourse


Don’t forget the Human Reaction



www.storiesabout.comwww.storiesabout.com/

[email protected]

Computer Feedback

• Non-judgemental/objective

• Is not the tutor who marks the final essay

• Feedback can be accessed many times

• Can lead to contact with tutor with more questions


Talk Back

• Checking understanding by ‘talk back’

• Summaries in OpenEssayist

• Key words = key ideas

• http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/safesea/


OpenEssayist: What it tells you

• The system’s focus is to present summaries of students’ own work in different ways, to encourage them to reflect constructively on what they have written.

• In other words Open Essayist tells them from its analysis what are the most important or key points in their essay. They can then think about whether that was what they intended to emphasise in their essay. If not then they can make the appropriate changes.

• A very important aspect of the OpenEssayist system is that it will not tell students what to write, or how to rewrite sections of their essay, or even what is correct or incorrect in their essay.


OpenEssayist: A tool for reflection

• Different views with distinct roles presented

• The purpose of this feedback is to encourage you

• to reflect on the draft text you submitted,

• to help you consider how your essay is organised,

• how the key terms are being used across the essay

• how they combine to form a cohesive discussion.


OpenEssayist: How it gives feedback

• Three aspects of the students’ essays are analysed by the system:

• the structure of the essay (which paragraphs constitute the introduction, the conclusion, the discussion sections, etc.),

• the key words and key phrases of their essay (which are the most important words and phrases, the ones that are most representative of the essay's overall meaning)

• the key sentences of their essay (which are whole sentences that are most representative of the essay's overall meaning).


ESSAY

GRAPHICS

ANALYSIS

Key word spring


Chord diagram


Key sentence adjacency matrix


Middle Space

• Develop new analytic methods• Computational

• Representational

• Statistical

• Visualisation


Visualisations as a Thinking Tool

• Visualising text (Bertin, 1981; Johnson et al, 1993)

• Free text visualisation still problematic

• Do users need training with visualisations?

• Convention vs. Instruction?


Short text for illustration of Rainbow Diagrams


Sentence graph of short text


OU essay awarded high grade


OU essay awarded low grade


Stanford University Boothe Prize essay


Pretend essay: 50 identical sentences


Pretend essay: 10 identical paragraphs


Participants for Empirical Study

Occupation University

Professor of Teaching & Learning OUC

Senior Lecturer Computer Science OUC

Administrator x 2 OUC

Professor OUC

Ph.D student x 6 OUC

Professor of Computer Science OUC

Vice Rector OUC

Senior Lecturer x 2 OU UK

Learning & Teaching Officer x 3 OU UK

Project Manager OU UK

OU student x 2 OU UK

Professor OU UK

Senior Administrator OU UK

Course Administrator OU UK


Findings


“One of the clues was talking about the way the color nodes, that the red ones are at the end. If they are a good connection with a good explanation for each paragraph. They should be connected together but the darker ones should be in the middle. But you see the color groups together so for me it automatically pulls my eye to this page because all the colors are closer together and more in the middle. So that would be the student course assignment essay with the highest mark.”

“You don’t show me anybody’s text. You are not revealing anyone else’s essay. So students cannot plagiarize. But you are saying ‘Look hang on, this is the way this essay connects together.’ That’s what telling a good story is about this linking.”

Creating teaching and learning dialogues: towards guided learning supported by technology

• Learning to judge

• Providing reassurance

• Providing a variety of signposted routes to achieve learning goals


Challenges

• Visualisation

• Social network analysis

• Communication and collaboration,

• Discourse analytics

• Interpretation training

• What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for successful implementation of learning analytics?


References• Van Labeke, N., Whitelock, D., Field, D., Pulman, S. & Richardson, J. (2013) ‘OpenEssayist: Extractive

Summarisation & Formative Assessment of Free-Text Essays’. Workshop on Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics, 3rd Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2013), Leuven, Belgium

• Whitelock, D. (2011) Activating Assessment for Learning: are we on the way with Web 2.0? In M.J.W. Lee & C. McLoughlin (Eds.) Web 2.0-Based-E-Learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching. IGI Global. pp. 319–342.

• Field, D., Pulman, S., Van Labeke, N., Whitelock, D. and Richardson, J.T.E. 2013. Did I really mean that? Applying automatic summarisation techniques to formative feedback. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (Hissar, Bulgaria, Sep. 2013).

• Van Labeke, N., Whitelock, D., Field, D., Pulman, S. and Richardson, J.T.E. 2013. What is my essay really saying? Using extractive summarization to motivate reflection and redrafting. Proceedings of the AIED Workshop on Formative Feedback in Interactive Learning Environments (Memphis, TN, Jul. 2013).

• Alden, B., Van Labeke, N., Field, D., Pulman, S., Richardson, J.T.E. and Whitelock, D. 2013. Using student experience to inform the design of an automated feedback system for essay answers. Proceedings of the 2013 International Computer Assisted Assessment Conference (Southampton, UK, Jul. 2013).

• Field, D., Richardson, J.T.E., Pulman, S., Van Labeke, N. and Whitelock, D. 2013. Reflections on characteristics of university students’ essays through experimentation with domain-independent natural language processing techniques. Proceedings of the 2013 International Computer Assisted Assessment Conference (Southampton, UK, Jul. 2013).

• Van Labeke, N., Whitelock, D., Field, D., Pulman, S. and Richardson, J.T.E. 2013. OpenEssayist: extractive summarisation and formative assessment of free-text essays. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics (Leuven, Belgium, Apr. 2013).


Designing and testing visual representations of draft essays for Higher Education Students

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