Understanding Revision Behavior in Adaptive Writing Support Systems for Education

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel pipeline to analyze student revision behaviors in adaptive writing tools, demonstrating its effectiveness in promoting revision, revealing strategies, and highlighting gender differences to inform future educational support systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a new scalable pipeline for measuring self-regulated learning behaviors in writing tasks, enhancing understanding of revision strategies in adaptive educational tools.

Findings

The tool effectively promoted student revision behavior.

Students improved their revision strategies over time.

Females were more efficient in using the tool.

Abstract

Revision behavior in adaptive writing support systems is an important and relatively new area of research that can improve the design and effectiveness of these tools, and promote students' self-regulated learning (SRL). Understanding how these tools are used is key to improving them to better support learners in their writing and learning processes. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline with insights into the revision behavior of students at scale. We leverage a data set of two groups using an adaptive writing support tool in an educational setting. With our novel pipeline, we show that the tool was effective in promoting revision among the learners. Depending on the writing feedback, we were able to analyze different strategies of learners when revising their texts, we found that users of the exemplary case improved over time and that females tend to be more efficient. Our research contributes a pipeline for measuring SRL behaviors at scale in writing tasks (i.e., engagement or revision behavior) and informs the design of future adaptive writing support systems for education, with the goal of enhancing their effectiveness in supporting student writing. The source code is available at https://github.com/lucamouchel/Understanding-Revision-Behavior.