Students’ academic language use when constructing scientific explanations in an intelligent tutoring system

Abstract

In the present study, we examined the use of academic language in students’ scientific explanations in the form of written claim, written evidence, and written reasoning (CER) statements during science inquiry within an intelligent tutoring system. Results showed that students tended to use more academic language when constructing their evidence and reasoning statements. Further analyses showed that both the number of words and pronouns used by students were significant predictors for the quality of students’ written CER statements. The quality of claim statements was significantly reduced by the lexical density (type-token ratio), but the quality of reasoning significantly increased with lexical density. The quality of evidence statements increased significantly with the inclusion of causal and temporal relationships, verb overlap, and descriptive writing. These findings indicate that students used language differently when constructing their CER statements. Implications are discussed in terms of how to increase students’ knowledge of and use of academic language.