Using Coh-Metrix to Analyse Writing Skills of Students: A Case Study in a Technological Common Core Curriculum Course

Abstract

Pedagogy with learning analytics is shown to facilitate the teaching-learning process through analysing student’s behaviours. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using a computational linguistic tool Coh-Metrix for analyzing and improving writing skills of students in a technological common core curriculum course. In this study, we mainly focused on the investigation of syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion, and deep cohesion of student’s essays. We studied 25 essays from the three-year curriculum students and 26 essays from the four-year curriculum students. Results illustrate the necessity of improving student’s writing skills in their university learning, so that they can effectively circulate their ideas to the public in the future.