{"pk":26243,"title":"Essays about service-learning events can be mined for program assessment","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Psychological applications of human language technologycombined with multidisciplinary approaches to similarity cal-culations and data visualization offer avenues to broaden theuse of students’ own words in program assessment. Wecompared multiple analysis approaches on both simple to-ken counts (word roots and character trigrams) and top-downlanguage indicators from 85 student essays about service-learning events. Bioinformatic distance calculations on wordroot counts provided useable assessment information on at-titude change, showing patterns of word use that match theholistic goals of the assignment. Although these patterns werenot found in a subsequent batch of 81 essays, the tools we areproviding may facilitate other efforts to detect attitude changein student writing about service-learning events.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"events; semantic similarity; LIWC; text mining"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06h4s772","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Anne","middle_name":"T.","last_name":"Gilman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Juniata College","department":""},{"first_name":"Deborah","middle_name":"W.","last_name":"Roney","name_suffix":"","institution":"Juniata College","department":""},{"first_name":"Victoria","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rehr","name_suffix":"","institution":"Columbus State Community College","department":""},{"first_name":"Helen","middle_name":"H.","last_name":"Hu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Penn State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Mark","middle_name":"P.","last_name":"Peterson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Viterbo Universty","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26243/galley/15879/download/"}]}