Rethinking the placement of the Submit button
Cursive Technology, Inc
Verify authorship, calculate effort, and build transparency through the writing process. Now available on Moodle LMS.
Think of the last time you wrote a paper: all of the effort, brainstorming, editing, revisions, and the minutes you might have spent focused on just a single three- or four-word phrase that sounded awkward. Think of the late-night realization of another point or the early-morning inspiration for a new way to state your conclusion. You might also think of the realization that your original thesis is no longer relevant and that through the writing process, you’ve come to a revised conclusion through writing and thinking.?
Only after all that toil, mental effort, and internal struggle did you click “submit.” Only the final static document was provided to the reviewer, evaluator, or teacher. A final, pristine representation of your thoughts remains. The backspace, deletes, inserts, cuts, and revisions swept away out of sight like the trimmings from a topiary, chipped rock from a marble statue, or shavings from a whittled piece of driftwood removed and hidden.?
From the start, our focus has been on how to quantify effort in writing instead of relying on only the final product to tie authorship directly to the writer. From an academic integrity standpoint, this gives us so much more data. The final draft and submission provide so much great data that it’s easy to see why we can utilize the static page for evaluation and grading.
From the submitted document, in addition to the final text, we can calculate so much of the modern rubric for writing (content, structure, format, grammar and mechanics, conclusion, etc.):
By no means are we advocating that the process is superior to the end product in evaluating a student’s work? After all, reviewing only key event data would be a confusing stream of time stamp and character data, like trying to grade a paper in the Matrix from the code on the ship of the Nebuchadnezzar (for the Waschkowski-buffs out there).???
What I have found interesting are the overlaps with what we can glean just from the process of writing as well (the key strikes and pauses captured through a keyboard)
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From the process, we capture the following:
But we can get even more information by focusing on the process, which is why I say the submit button is wrong. By ignoring the process and focusing on the product, we miss one of the most important elements of writing: time.
Just from our simple key event data stream, we’re able to calculate:
It’s been invigorating to dive into the literature about key log data, research into the writing process, and what it can and can’t tell us about cognition and writing quality. Evaluating the writing process, and incorporating the proof of effort, is not a new idea but one that we’re fully invested in supporting.?
One of my favorite recent reads is {ENTER}ing the time series {SPACE}: Uncovering the writing process through keystroke analyses by Laura K. Allen, Matthew E. Jacovina, Mihai Dascalu, Rod D. Roscoe, Kevin M. Kent, Aaron D. Likens, Danielle S. McNamara. This paper’s (link) conclusion was that almost three-quarters of the variance in essay quality was explainable through the key event data. This was uncovered through feature extraction and machine learning and could be used to help improve automated evaluation and feedback systems (or to provide more timely feedback directly to students during the writing process!).