Identifying Editor Roles in Argumentative Writing from Student Revision Histories

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to identify different editor roles in student argumentative writing by analyzing revision behaviors, linking these roles to revision purposes and writing improvement.

Contribution

It develops a novel topic modeling approach to classify editor roles based on revision operation, purpose, and position, and validates their relevance to writing quality.

Findings

Editor roles explain variance in revision purposes.

Modeling roles relates to writing improvement.

Method effectively captures revision behavior patterns.

Abstract

We present a method for identifying editor roles from students' revision behaviors during argumentative writing. We first develop a method for applying a topic modeling algorithm to identify a set of editor roles from a vocabulary capturing three aspects of student revision behaviors: operation, purpose, and position. We validate the identified roles by showing that modeling the editor roles that students take when revising a paper not only accounts for the variance in revision purposes in our data, but also relates to writing improvement.