Identifying Editor Roles in Argumentative Writing from Student Revision Histories
This work addresses the problem of understanding student writing behaviors for educational applications, but it appears incremental as it applies existing topic modeling to a new context.
The researchers tackled the problem of identifying editor roles in student argumentative writing by analyzing revision histories, and they validated that modeling these roles accounts for variance in revision purposes and relates to writing improvement.
We present a method for identifying editor roles from students' revision behaviors during argumentative writing. We first develop a method for applying a topic modeling algorithm to identify a set of editor roles from a vocabulary capturing three aspects of student revision behaviors: operation, purpose, and position. We validate the identified roles by showing that modeling the editor roles that students take when revising a paper not only accounts for the variance in revision purposes in our data, but also relates to writing improvement.