A critiquing system to support English composition through the use of latent semantic analysis

Many students find essay writing stressful because they do not have sufficient ideas to fully cover the topic of the essay. They usually run out of ideas before they can complete their essays. In this paper, we investigate the use of critiquing systems [G. Fischer et al., (1991), J.E. Robbins, (1998)] and latent semantic analysis [T.K. Landauer et al., (1998), D.J. Steinhart, (2001)] to support computer-supported teaching of English composition at the high school level. We start by characterizing essay composition as a design activity and make use of Donald Schon's [D.A. Schon, (1983)] theory of reflection-inaction to identify key elements of an English composition design environment. We make use of latent semantic analysis (LSA) to analyze student essays and compute feedback by comparing their essays with teacher's model essays. We describe the basics of LSA, explain a system architecture that incorporates LSA, present the first version of a prototype we have built, and report the results from an experiment. We end the paper by describing some of our plans for future work.