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Measuring and Visualizing Metadiscursive Markers in Student Writing

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Exploration of Written and Team Communication

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM)

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43894

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43894

Download Count

125

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Paper Authors

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Aneet Dharmavaram Narendranath Michigan Technological University

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Dr. Aneet Narendranath is an Associate Teaching Professor at Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech). His primary focus is learning analytics with an emphasis on the application of natural language processing to student discourse.

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Zachary Thelander

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Sirena C. Hargrove-Leak Elon University

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Sirena Hargrove-Leak is an Associate Professor in the Engineering Program at Elon University. The mission and commitment of Elon University have led her to explore the scholarship of teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). More specifically, her current engineering education interests include entrepreneurial mindsets, user-centered design, project-based learning, and broadening participation in STEM − particularly for populations historically underrepresented in STEM fields. As a teacher-scholar, Dr. Hargrove-Leak is passionate about applying what she learns in her research in the classroom, while mentoring undergraduates in research projects driven by their personal and professional interests, and in service in the local community to get young people excited about STEM.

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Abstract

Meta-discourse markers (MDM) are words or phrases that help connect and organize ideas or attitudes in genre-specific written discourse. The presence of MDM may be confirmed using rule-based or dictionary-based techniques, and their distribution may be measured to help deconstruct genre-specific discourse. In cross-sectional or longitudinal writing analyses, such a deconstruction may help identify "something" about knowledge sharing, learning, topic or authorship attribution, and knowledge symmetries (or asymmetries).

This paper introduces a methodology consisting of data processing and visualization at the intersection of genre analysis, statistics, dimensionality reduction, and natural language processing. We first apply this methodology to publicly available newsgroup data, which is pre-labeled by topic to demonstrate that MDM distribution may be used to extract a visual dichotomy in the text structure of different topics. In other words, text data about a specific topic have similar MDM distribution characteristics. Next, we apply this methodology to unlabeled reflective essays authored by "n" students in an Engineering mechanics classroom infused with entrepreneurial mindset (EM) activities to identify if MDM distribution and clustering indicate the presence of EM.

Future work will include exploring the confluence of MDM and rhetorical moves since we believe this will support identifying EM, metacognition, and/or achieving a threshold skill. As part of this broader goal, we will create web-based digital tools to assess student writing and statistical regression models that would automatically classify the presence of an Entrepreneurial mindset in student writing.

Dharmavaram Narendranath, A., & Thelander, Z., & Hargrove-Leak, S. C. (2023, June), Measuring and Visualizing Metadiscursive Markers in Student Writing Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43894

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