EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN ACTION: THE DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN OF WRITING-PAL
Abstract
Writing-Pal is an intelligent tutoring system created to enhance the essay-writing skills of high school students through comprehensive writing strategy instruction and guided practice. The system employs interactive lessons, engaging games, and practical essay-writing exercises to teach students effective writing techniques. This paper provides an in-depth overview of Writing-Pal's foundations and design, which are anchored in essential pedagogical principles and advanced educational technology design. These foundational elements are critical for ensuring the system's efficacy, stability, and adaptability across various environments, including laboratories, classrooms, and students' homes. This paper aims to inform educational developers and others in the field who encounter similar objectives and challenges in developing educational tools
Keywords:
Intelligent tutoring system Essay-writing skills Educational technology Writing strategy instruction High school educationDownloads
Published
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12819586Issue
Section
How to Cite
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Lisa Marie Carter

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
References
Aleven V, Koedinger KR (2002). An effective meta-cognitive strategy: Learning by doing and explaining with a computerbased cognitive tutor. Cognitive Science, 26: 147-179.
Beal C, Arroyo I, Cohen P, Woolf B (2010). Evaluation of animal watch: An intelligent tutoring system for arithmetic and fractions. J. Interactive Online Learning, 9: 64-77.
Burstein J, Chodorow M, Leacock C (2004). Automated essay evaluation: The criterion online writing service. AI Magazine, 25: 27-36.
Burnstein J, Marcu D, Knight K (2003). Finding the WRITE stuff: Automatic identification of discourse structure in student essays. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18: 32-39.
Craig S, Driscoll D, Gholson B (2004). Constructing knowledge from dialog in an intelligent tutoring system: Interactive learning, vicarious learning and pedagogical agents. J. Edu. Multimedia and Hypermedia 13: 161-183. de la Paz S (2007). Managing cognitive demands for writing: Comparing the effects of instructional components in strategy instruction. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 23: 249-266.
de la Paz S, Graham S (2002). Explicitly teaching strategies, skills and knowledge: Writing instruction in middle school classrooms. J. Edu. Psychol. 94: 687-698.
Embi ZC (2005). A case study on the implementation of framework for edutainment environment. Cyberjaya, Malaysia: Multimedia University.
Fang X, Holsapple CW (2007). An empirical study of web site navigation structures' impacts on web site usability. Decision Support Systems, 43: 476-491.
Gee JP (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan.
Gee JP (2008). Learning and games. In K. Salen (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games and learning (pp. 21–40). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Geiser S, Studley R (2001). Relative contribution of high school grades, SAT I and SAT II scores in predicting success at UC: Preliminary findings. Unpublished manuscript, University of California.
Graesser AC, Lu S, Jackson GT, Mitchell H, Ventura M, Olney A, Louwerse MM (2004). AutoTutor: A tutor with dialogue in natural language. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments and Computers, 36: 180-193.
Graesser AC, McNamara DS, VanLehn K (2005). Scaffolding deep comprehension strategies through PointandQuery, AutoTutor and iSTART. Educational Psychologist, 40: 225-234.
Graham S, Perin D (2007). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students. J. Edu. Psychol. 99: 445-476.
Hillocks G (1984). What works in teaching composition: A meta- analysis of experimental treatment studies. Ame. J. Edu. 93: 133170.
Johnson WL, Rickel J, Lester JC (2000). Animated pedagogical agents: Face-to-face interaction in interactive learning environments. Int. J. Artificial Intelligence in Edu. 11: 47-78.
Kellogg R, Raulerson B (2007). Improving the writing skills of college students. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14: 237-242. Light R (2001). Making the most of college. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Litman D, Silliman S (2004). ITSPOKE: An intelligent tutoring spoken dialogue system. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the 4th Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistic. Boston, MA: HLT/NAACL.
McNamara DS, Levinstein IB, Boonthum C (2004). iSTART: Interactive strategy trainer for active reading and thinking. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 36: 222-233.
McNamara DS, O'Reilly T, Best R, Ozuru Y (2006). Improving adolescent students' reading comprehension with iSTART. J. of Edu. Compt. Res. 34: 147-171.
McNamara DS, Raine R, Roscoe R, Crossley S, Jackson GT, Dai J, Cai Z, Renner A, Brandon R, Weston J, Dempsey K, Lam D, Sullivan S, Kim L, Rus V, Floyd R, McCarthy PM, Graesser AC (in press). The Writing-Pal: Natural language algorithms to support intelligent tutoring on writing strategies. In P.M. McCarthy and C. Boonthum (Eds.), Applied natural language processing and content analysis: Identification, investigation and resolution. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (2002). The nation’s report card: Writing 2002. Retrieved from
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2002/2003529.as p
National Commission on Writing (2004). Writing: A ticket to work…or a ticket out. College Board.
National Commission on Writing (2008). Writing: A ticket to work…or a ticket out: A survey of business leaders. College Board.
Nielson J (1993). Usability engineering. New York, NY: Morgan Kaufmann.
Page, EB, and Petersen, NS (1995). The computer moves into essay grading: Updating the ancient test. Phi Delta Kappan, 76, 561-565.
Palmer JW (2002). Web site usability, design and performance metrics. Information Systems Research, 13: 151-167.
Pitkow J, Kehoe C (1996). Emerging trends in the WWW user population. Communications of the ACM, 39: 106-108.
Porter LR (1997). Creating virtual classroom: Distance learning with the Internet. New York, NY: Wiley.
Powell P (2009). Retention and writing instruction: Implications for access and pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 60: 664-682.
Quintana C, Reiser BJ, Davis EA, Krajcik J, Fretz E, Duncan RG, Kyza E, Edelson D, Soloway E (2004). A scaffolding design framework for software to support science inquiry. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13: 337-386.
Sharp DB (2007). Learn to write. ISA Career website. http://www.isa.org/Template.cfm?Section=CareersandTemplate=
/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfmandContentID=5328
Shermis MD, Mzumara HR, Olson J, Harrington S (2001). Online grading of student essays: PEG goes on the world wide web. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 26: 247-259.
Shneiderman B (1998). Designing the user interface: Strategies for effective human-computer interaction. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley.
Tan P, Ling S, Ting C (2007). Adaptive digital game-based learning framework. In K. K. W. Wong, L. Fung, and P. Cole, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Digital interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, pp. 142-146. New York, NY: ACM.
VanLehn K, Graesser AC, Jackson GT, Jordan P, Olney A, Rosé C (2007). When are tutorial dialogues more effective than reading? Cognitive Science, 31: 3-52.
VanLehn K, Lynch C, Schulze K, Shapiro JA, Shelby R, Taylor L, Treacy D, Weinstein A, Wintersgill M (2005). The Andes physics tutoring system: Lessons learned. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 15: 147-204.
Wade-Stein D, Kintsch E (2004). Summary Street: Interactive computer support for writing. Cognition and Instruction, 22: 333362.