An Intelligent Tutoring System to Evaluate and Advise on Lexical Richness in Students Writings

摘要

Lexical competence, the writer ability to use properly vocabulary, becomes a basic issue of a writing instructor when reviewing drafts. Here, we present the basic part of a web-based intelligent tutoring system to provide student guidance and evaluation in structuring research proposals. We elaborate a network-based model to follow the progress of each student in the development of the project, supply assignments and personalized feedback on each evaluation. This tutor includes for now a module for assessing the lexical richness, in terms of three measures: variety, density, and sophistication, that are described. We also explain the methodology for pilot testing with undergraduate students, whose results were encouraging, indicating that the tutor indeed helps students.