Monday, July 02, 2012

Helping Students Write

One of the projects I have been considering is an Intelligent Tutoring System to help students (and teachers) write. In teaching university students about ICT Sustainability, I set small discussion topics and large assignments. But I then have to spend a lot of my time on the basics of how to write, rather than the details of the topic. This is particularly the case for international students, for whom English is a second language, but applies to some extent to all students (in particular science and technology students). Also I have to ensure that what I write is readable to the students.

One thought I had was an AI tutor which would carry out simple analysis of the student's writing and give them tips. This would be paralytically useful for discussion forums, where students are used to a less formal style than is prorate for formal academic dissuasion. Some of the tests which would be reasonably easy to carry out would be spelling (allowing for variations in international English), vocabulary (checking if non-technical words are amongst the approximately 19,000 in the Simple English Wiktionary) and referencing (checking if phrases which can be found with a web search have been cited). Harder to check would be grammar.

1 comment:

rohan said...

An automated approach to scoring student essays was the subject of a recent successful (?) kaggle competition.