Using Coh-Metrix to automatically assess students' writing proficiency

摘要

It is of great significance to discriminate good writing and poor writing and Coh-Metrix,a computational tool of reliability and validity,was used to find out the variables distinguishing the quality of students' timed compositions.Based on the findings,indices of number of words,average words per sentence and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level(0-12) have a predicative power as a function of essay quality distinguishing well-graded writing and less-graded writing in 90 texts chosen at random.These findings indicate that the textual features of good writing and poor writing lies not in the readability of the text comprehension but longer text with more words embedded in sentences.