A Framework for Behavior Analysis of an Essay Writing for Understanding Learners’ Thinking Process

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a writing supporting tool to train users’ cognitive skill and to monitor their action in the tool for behavior analysis. The tool is to ask users to declare their thought and logical relation of sentences in their writing. This helps users to start thinking about their thought by focusing more on idea and strategy. By detecting users’ action to the tool user interface, we can study and analyze users’ behavior during the writing process that reflects their thought perspective including content understanding and planning. From an experiment, we found that users who obtained high rating from written essay have common solid action patterns as providing content, selecting the type, and assigning relationship respectively, and they generally spend less time in every action. On the other hand, users who produce an essay with low rating share fewer common patterns, and the patterns are sporadic while they need to redo the actions several times. The results also suggest that the thinking about an intention of a content and relationship of sentences gives the better essay rating than not.