Learning traces, competence assessment, and causal inference for English composition

It is widely acknowledged that writing is a process and should be taught as a process. However, it is still assessed as though it is a product. Educational technology makes now possible for teachers to become observers of the writing process of their students to discover how their writing competences (e.g., grammatical accuracy, topic flow, transition, and vocabulary usage) develop over time. The present research proposes an innovative technique to identify the actual drivers of writing performance through a formal causality framework, unleashing a new source of potential insights to scaffold more effectively the writing process and guarantee more reliable success at the end.