Towards Automatic Assessments of Collaborative Writing on Wiki

Abstract

Wiki has been increasingly adopted as a tool to support teamwork in the educational context. Despite of the benefits brought by Wiki, instructors may hesitate in adopting it as it takes much workload of instructors to assess student learning. Nonetheless, there is a lack of direct research on automatically assessing collaborative writing on Wiki. In order to fill the gap, this study attempts to explore the potential of various indicators of the quality of collaborative writing on Wiki, using natural language processing (NLP). The computed quality indicators of academic writing and cognitive thinking can be useful for instructors when monitoring and assessing students’ group assignments on Wiki.