A Pilot Study on the Impact of the Web-based Essay Critiquing System on Writing at the Tertiary Level
Kelvin Chi Kuen Wong, Fion S.L. Lee, Cynthia F. K. Lee, William K. Cheung, Anders I. Mørch, Jiming Liu · HKBU Institutional Repository (Hong Kong Baptist University) · 2007
As English is widely used worldwide, it is the preferred second language in Hong Kong. Many students find essay writing stressful because they do not have sufficient ideas to fully cover the topic of the essay. To alleviate the aforementioned learning barriers, a web-based essay critiquing system was developed using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), an automatic text analysis technique, for providing just-in-time feedback to students. The feedback takes two forms: new sub-themes suggested to be included, and the visualization of the existing sub-themes’ organization. In this paper, we present our findings on students’ performance and their perception of the usefulness of this system.