This study examines the potential to use keystroke logs to examine differences between authentic writing and transcribed essay writing. Transcribed writing produced within writing platforms where copy and paste functions are disabled indicates that students are likely copying texts from the internet or from generative artificial intelligence (AI)…

This paper argues that traditional threshold-based approaches to the analysis of pauses in writing fail to capture the complexity of the cognitive processes involved in text production. It proposes that, to capture these processes, pause analysis should focus on the transition times between linearly produced units of text. Following a review of…

Recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) is a time-series analysis method that uses autocorrelation properties of typing data to detect regularities within the writing process. The following paper first gives a detailed introduction to RQA and its application to time series data. We then apply RQA to keystroke logging data of first and foreign…

Writing is an essential skill for success in many academic and professional settings. Despite receiving individualized feedback on their writing, many students struggle with writing in postsecondary education. This dissertation addresses this gap by focusing on the writing process--the moment-by-moment actions taken during writing--rather than the…

Feedback is an essential component of learning environments. However, providing feedback in populated classes can be challenging for teachers. On the one hand, it is unlikely that a single kind of feedback works for all students considering the heterogeneous nature of their needs. On the other hand, delivering personalized feedback is infeasible…

This work aims to characterize students' writing processes using keystroke logs and understand how the extracted characteristics influence the text quality at specific moments of writing. Earlier works have proposed predictive models characterizing students' writing processes and mainly rely on distribution-based measures of pauses obtained from…

The goal of this study is to model pauses extracted from writing keystroke logs as a way of characterizing the processes students use in essay composition. Low-level timing data were modeled, the interkey interval and its subtype, the intraword duration, thought to reflect processes associated with keyboarding skills and composition fluency.…

When responding to a writing task, writers spend a significant amount of their time not writing. These periods of physical inactivity, or pauses, during writing provide observable and measurable cues as to when, where, and how long writers halt to plan and/or revise their texts. Consequently, examining writers' pausing patterns can provide…

This study investigates how and whether information about students' writing can be recovered from basic behavioral data extracted during their sessions in an intelligent tutoring system for writing. We calculate basic and time-sensitive keystroke indices based on log files of keys pressed during students' writing sessions. A corpus of prompt-based…

Background: Integrated reading-into-writing tasks are increasingly used in large-scale language proficiency tests. Such tasks are said to possess higher authenticity as they reflect real-life writing conditions better than independent, writing-only tasks. However, to effectively define the reading-into-writing construct, more empirical evidence…

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and…

Most of the previous research on aphasia and writing ability concentrates on the production of words in isolation. The purpose of the current study was to examine the process of producing written texts by clients with aphasia. By using keystroke logging, it was possible to analyse the participants' ongoing work during text writing. Results showed…

This article discusses the use of computer logging as a means of investigating aspects of the second language (L2) writing process as writers are engaged in producing text at the keyboard. The observation of writing by means of this method provides researchers with detailed information concerning aspects of the planning, formulation, and revision…

Investigates the ability of third-grade students to generate essays either by hand or with a word processing program. Indicates that the length and quality of the handwritten essays were superior to the computer-generated ones, suggesting that third-grade students were not as efficient in using a word processing program to generate essays as they…