Designing personalised, automated feedback to develop students’ research writing skills

Abstract

Constructive and formative feedback on writing is crucial to help Higher Degree Research (HDR) students develop effective writing skills and succeed, both in their degree and beyond. However, at the start students have a poor grasp of good academic writing, and HDR supervisors do not always have the time or the writing expertise to provide quality, constructive, formative feedback to students. One approach to address this problem is provided by Writing Analytics (WA), using text analytics to provide timely, formative feedback to students on their writing, in the process introducing a clear set of terms to describe important features of academic writing. This paper describes how Swales’ (1990) Create A Research Space (CARS) model was used to extend a writing analytics tool such that it could be applied to HDR students’ writing, and how good feedback practices were employed to design constructive automated feedback. This work summarises a process that can be used to develop theory driven writing analytics tools that should facilitate thesis writing.