How Do Educationally At-Risk Men and Women Differ in Their Essay-Writing Processes?

Abstract

This study examined differences in the composition processes used by educationally at-risk males and females who wrote essays as part of a high-school equivalency examination. Over 30,000 individuals were assessed, each taking one of 12 forms of the examination’s language arts writing subtest in 23 US states. Writing processes were inferred using features extracted from keystroke logs and aggregated into seven composite indicators. Results showed that females earned higher essay and total language arts writing composite scores than did males, but only by trivial amounts. More pertinent was that, after controlling for language arts writing composite score, age, and essay prompt, all seven process indicators showed nontrivial, statistically significant differences, the most notable being for indicators related to fluency and different aspects of editing. The study’s findings are consistent in important ways with those from other investigations of school-age students and adults, and with results from both online and paper-based writing tasks. Implications are offered for conducting similar research for individuals composing in character-based languages like Chinese.