An Automated Feedback System to Support Student Learning in Writing-to-Learn Activities

Abstract

Formative feedback has long been recognized as a crucial scaffold for student learning. Due to the job demand of instructors, it is impossible for them to provide individual students with on-demand formative feedback based on individual students' performance. There is a growing interest in developing better approaches to provide students with automated formative feedback to assist their learning. In this research, we design and develop an automated formative feedback system to support student learning of conceptual knowledge in the course of writing assignments. In the proposed system, formative feedback can be generated automatically with the help of concept maps constructed from instructors' lecture slides and students' writing assignments. In this paper, we present the automatic approach to generate formative feedback, discuss the system architecture, and illustrate a prototype of the proposed system.