Design and Implementation of a Pedagogic Intervention Using Writing Analytics

Abstract

Academic writing is a key skill required for higher education students, which is often challenging to learn. A promising approach to help students develop this skill is the use of automated tools that provide formative feedback on writing. However, such tools are not widely adopted by students unless useful for their discipline-related writing, and embedded in the curriculum. This recognition motivates an increased emphasis in the field on aligning learning analytics applications with learning design, so that analytics-driven feedback is congruent with the pedagogy and assessment regime. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a pedagogic intervention that was developed for law students to make use of an automated Academic Writing Analytics tool (AWA) for improving their academic writing. In exemplifying this pedagogically aligned learning analytic intervention, we describe the development of a learning analytics platform to support the pedagogic design, illustrating its potential through example analyses of data derived from the task.