Students' drafting strategies and text quality

The study reports an analysis of the drafts produced by two groups of students during an exam. Drafts were categorized as a function of some of their graphic features (e.g. their length), and of their different planning strategies used for their production (e.g. note draft, organized draft, composed draft). Grades obtained by the students on their essays related to the different categories of drafts. Results show that 2/3 of both groups of students made some kinds of draft. Drafts mostly consisted of note drafts or long composed drafts. Very few consisted of organized drafts. However, students that wrote these latter drafts obtained the best ratings. Drafting strategy was homogeneous for half of the students who used one category. The other half successively used two drafting modes. In that case they mostly associated writing with jotting down notes or with some marks of organization. Here, again, students who organized, even partially, their drafts obtained the highest grades. Very few corrections were brought to the long drafts and they concerned the surface (spelling or lexicon), not the content or the plan. This research shows that only a limited number of students used an efficient drafting (organized draft) even though such a strategy is generally associated with the highest ratings

Narrative and descriptive text revising strategies and procedures

Forty-eight children and forty-eight adults of contrasting degrees of expertise made a series of corrections in order to improve a text (narrative or description) in which three within-statement errors and three between-statement errors had been inserted. Subjects used a simplified word processor (SCRIPREV) which recorded all movements of linguistic units. The purpose of this research was to study revising strategies by examining the correction-sequencing procedures implemented by these subjects. The procedures, which were coded in the form of time series, were compared to the time series of model revising procedures (i.e. effective ones) representing three strategies based on certain predefined functional principles (linguistic level, execution order). The adults used two of these strategies. The Simultaneous Strategy for the narrative, and the Local-then-Global Strategy for the description. The children used the Local-then-Global Strategy for the narrative, but did not use any identifiable procedure to revise the description, which they did not manage to totally improve in the expected manner

Effect of screen presentation on text reading and revising. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies

Two studies using the methods of experimental psychology assessed the effects of two types of text presentation (page-by-page vs. scrolling) on participants' performance while reading and revising texts. Greater facilitative effects of the page-by-page presentation were observed in both tasks. The participants' reading task performance indicated that they built a better mental representation of the text as a whole and were better at locating relevant information and remembering the main ideas. Their revising task performance indicated a larger number of global corrections (which are the most difficult to make)

Revising strategies for different text types

Forty-eight children and forty-eight adults of contrasting degrees of expertise made a series of corrections in order to improve a text (narrative or description) in which three within-statement errors and three between-statement errors had been inserted. Subjects used a simplified word processor (SCRIPREV) which recorded all movements of linguistic units. The purpose of this research was to study revising strategies by examining the correction-sequencing procedures implemented by these subjects. The procedures, which were coded in the form of time series, were compared to the time series of model revising procedures (i.e. effective ones) representing three strategies based on certain predefined functional principles (linguistic level, execution order). The adults used two of these strategies: the Simultaneous Strategy for the narrative, and the Local-then-Global Strategy for the description. The children used the Local-then-Global Strategy for the narrative, but did not use any identifiable procedure to revise the description, which they did not manage to totally improve in the expected manner

Catalogue of Anti-Patterns for formal Ontology debugging

Debugging of inconsistent OWL ontologies is normally a tedious and time-consuming task where a combination of ontology engineers and domain expert is often required to understand whether the changes to be performed in order to make the OWL ontology consistent are actually changing the intended meaning of the original knowledge model. This task is aided by existing ontology debugging systems, incorporated in existing reasoners and ontology engineering tools, which ameliorate this problem but in complex cases are still far from providing adequate support to ontology engineers, due to lack of efficiency or lack of precision in determining the main causes for inconsistencies. In this paper we describe a set of anti-patterns commonly found in OWL ontologies, which can be useful in the task of ontology debugging in combination with those debugging tools

Some criteria for stably birational equivalence of quadratic forms

Let $\varphi$ and $\psi$ be quadratic forms over a field $K$ of characteristic different from 2. In this paper, we give a criterion for isotropy of $\varphi$ over the function field of $\psi$ in terms of representations and we apply it to stably birational equivalence of $\varphi$ and $\psi$. Then we use this criterion to investigate the case of stably birational equivalence of multiples of Pfister forms. Finally, we give a a criterion of stably birational equivalence of quadratic forms in terms of isomorphisms of quotients of special Clifford groups by the kernel of the spinor norm.Comment: 16 page

SCRIPTKELL : a tool for measuring cognitive effort and time processing in writing and other complex cognitive activities

We present SCRIPTKELL, a computer-assisted experimental tool that makes it possible to measure the time and cognitive effort allocated to the subprocesses of writing and other cognitive activities, SCRIPTKELL was designed to easily use and modulate Kellogg's (1986) triple-task procedure,.which consists of a combination of three tasks: a writing task (or another task), a reaction time task (auditory signal detection), and a directed retrospection task (after each signal detection during writing). We demonstrate how this tool can be used to address several novel empirical and theoretical issues. In sum, SCRIPTKELL should facilitate the flexible realization of experimental designs and the investigation of critical issues concerning the functional characteristics of complex cognitive activities

OnlynessIsLoneliness (OIL)

Our work is based on the debugging process of real ontologies that have been developed by domain experts, who are not necessarily too familiar with DL, and hence can misuse DL constructors and misunderstand the semantics of some OWL expressions, leading to unwanted unsatisfiable classes. Our patterns were first found during the debugging process of a medium-sized OWL ontology (165 classes) developed by a domain expert in the area of hydrology [9]. The first version of this ontology had a total of 114 unsatisfiable classes. The information provided by the debugging systems used ([3], [5]) on (root) unsatisfiable classes was not easily understandable by domain experts to find the reasons for their unsatisfiability. And in several occasions during the debugging process the generation of justifications for unsatisfiability took several hours, what made these tools hard to use, confirming the results described in [8]. Using this debugging process and several other real ontologies debugging one, we found out that in several occasions domain experts were just changing axioms from the original ontology in a somehow random manner, even changing the intended meaning of the definitions instead of correcting errors in their formalisatio

Contextes de production et justification écrite d'un point de vue par des enfants âgés de 10 à 13 ans

This study investigates both qualitative and quantitative production of sentences produced by 113 writers between 10 to 13 year of age for justifying points of views. Eight different production contexts were constructed from the modalities of three factors (familiarity with the topic, acceptance of the to be defended thesis and consensual opinion), such as they appear for example in sentences like "eating candies is good because..." or "going on a trip is not good, because...". The results clearly showed than from ten years of age children were able to justify whichever point of view and its opposite by referring to specific information which are largely shared. However, the number and the nature of the arguments varied as a function of contexts. Children write more arguments when they have to defend a view which conform a consensual opinion, whereas they diversify their arguments by supporting points of views which do not conform a consensual perspective. The lack of practice with the activity constitutes in both cases a favorable condition. Within the framework of developing aids for school training and argumentative writing, our findings show that it is possible to use with non expert writers either context which favor quantitative production or contexts which bring to a qualitative diversification of arguments

Effet du traitement de texte et des correcteurs sur la maîtrise de l'orthographe et de la grammaire en langue seconde

Deux recherches ont permis d'évaluer les performances d'élèves de seconde qui s'entraînaient à rédiger en anglais avec ou sans ordinateur. Parallèlement, des enquêtes par questionnaire ont permis de cerner les représentations des élèves sur l'utilisation des correcteurs. Ces deux recherches ont montré, à des degrés différents, que l'usage de l'ordinateur a un effet bénéfique sur la production écrite des élèves en langue seconde. 11 apparaît particulièrement que les élèves bénéficient différemment de l'outil informatique selon le type de logiciels qu'ils utilisent, et selon le type de textes qu'ils doivent rédiger