The Language of Reflective Essays: What Writing Analytics Tells Us About Student Learning
Michael Householder (SAGES)
Martha Schaffer (Department of English)
2019–2020 Freedman Faculty Fellows
Michael Householder is the Associate Director of SAGES and an Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to his work on composition and writing analytics, he specializes in American literature, as well as bioethics and medical humanities.Martha Schaffer is the Associate Director of Composition and an Instructor in the Department of English. She teaches first-year writing, rhetoric, and linguistics. Her current research explores how teachers can help novice writers evaluate their own writing and potential for growth into future writing projects and writing selves.
In our project, we have used machine-enhanced textual and content analysis to study two thousand reflective essays submitted by CWRU students as part of their SAGES Writing Portfolios. In doing so, we aim to learn more about how students in the SAGES Program describe their writing, themselves as writers, and their experiences as learners. We plan to use collected data to enhance writing instruction and assessment in the SAGES Program, as well as to demonstrate how collaborative, interdisciplinary work in the digital humanities can enhance programmatic-level writing assessment.
Recognizing that human readers have limited ability to analyze the thousands of pieces of student writing collected annually in student portfolios, we hypothesize that machine-enhanced analytics can provide an enriched understanding of a large corpus of reflective texts, providing new perspectives on, hidden insights into, and broader understanding of students’ beliefs about their writing and learning.
