Linguistic content analysis as a tool for improving adaptive instruction

Abstract

This study investigates methods to automatically assess the features of content texts within an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). Coh-Metrix was used to calculate linguistic indices for texts (n = 66) within the reading strategy ITS, iSTART. Coh-Metrix indices for the system texts were compared to students' (n = 126) self-explanation scores to examine the degree to which linguistic indices predicted students' self-explanation quality. Initial analyses indicated no relation between self-explanation scores on a given text and its linguistic properties. However, subsequent analyses indicated the presence of robust text effects when analyses were separated for high and low reading ability students. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.