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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of sentence combining (SC) and sentence decombining (SD) activities on fostering reading comprehension. As a widely used writing activity for enhancing syntactic fluency in English Language Arts (ELA) classes, SC requires learners to combine short sentences into longer and more complex sentences, while SD requires learners to break down a long sentence into the shortest grammatically allowable sentences.

This study assessed the effects of SD and SC in comparison with a control group on the improvement of reading comprehension ability among college students learning English as their second language (L2) in the context of a six-week English language learning program. Participants with overall intermediate English language proficiency were randomly assigned to one of three different conditions: SC, SD and control. Also, a subset of the participants was interviewed after the intervention.

The results showed that SD was more effective than SC or control condition in enhancing syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension, as measured by a standardized English proficiency test. Data obtained from post-study interviews further suggested that only SD was perceived by the participants as having enhanced their reading comprehension.

The present study provides a valuable addition to a body of research on sentence manipulation activities in ELA classes. For those L2 learners who have passed a pre-intermediate threshold level, SD appears to be more beneficial than SC in enhancing syntactic knowledge, which, in turn, appears to contribute to better reading comprehension.

Many students in the United States struggle to achieve proficiency in writing. Writing is an important skill to develop, as it is a way for students to communicate what they know and integrate knowledge and critical thinking skills. A lack of writing proficiency can have a significant impact on academic performance in secondary school and on postsecondary outcomes. Improving writing instruction requires theoretically sound, scientifically validated teaching practices, including assessments and instructional methods. It also requires that teachers are well prepared to implement such practices, including using assessment data to tailor instructional methods to meet the needs of students who experience significant writing difficulties. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of advances in research and practice related to validated teaching practices designed to improve the writing outcomes of students with intensive needs, and to describe an innovative way to prepare and support teachers to implement such practices.

This chapter details how engaging students in digital comics creation might support adolescents in strengthening their narrative writing capabilities. This chapter first provides a more detailed explanation of the micro and macrostructural elements involved in narrative production. Second, the chapter provides an introduction to comics and important design features. The authors also illuminate the complexity of multimodal texts (texts that combine images and words) and link visual narrative pedagogy and curriculum to classroom equity and accessibility. Across these opening sections, academic standards are referenced to show how the comics medium aligns with national visions of what robust English Language Arts education entails. The chapter concludes with descriptions of specific pedagogical strategies and digital comic-making tools that teachers and interventionists might explore with students within various classroom contexts. Examples of digital comics designed using various web tools are also shared.

This chapter provides a look at the experiences of two Teacher Educators in the Field (TEFs) as they work to shift writing instruction in suburban districts across the Houston metroplex. A review of the literature on most promising practices for literacy educators is provided along with narrative interspersion of restoried enactments of TEFs in public education systems serving students in grades 6–12. Our planned and lived experiences were often dissonant due to the complexity of increasingly diverse demographic populations in fast-growing districts who struggled to shift the focus of instruction in correlation to audience. Our stories present focused reflection on the need for additional supports geared toward teacher development, TEF retention, and consistent engagement from campus and district-level administrators.

The aims of this study are to examine the influence of offender age, offender abuse history, crime outcome and attributions for crime on judgments about young offenders.

A sample of 240 British undergraduates was asked to respond to a scenario about a young person who committed a crime, recommend a sentence, and rate the young offender's criminal accountability and legal understandings. Their attributions for crime were measured using the CDS‐II, adapted for observer attributions. The age of the young offender (ten years, 14 years, or 17 years), abuse history (abused or not abused) and crime outcome (victim death or injury) were varied systematically.

Internal attributions predicted participants' beliefs about punishment and sentencing recommendations. Although participants considered the youngest offenders to be less criminally accountable and unlikely to understand the legal process, this did not affect recommended punishment. Attributions of personal control were influenced by abuse history; the behavior of offenders with a history of abuse was considered less within the offender's personal control.

The results demonstrate the types of attributions and information that influence the opinions of jury‐eligible British adults when asked to make decisions about serious offences committed by young offenders.

Search engine users are faced with long lists of search results, each entry being of a varying degree of relevance. Often users' expectations based on the short text of a search result hold false expectations about the linked web page. This leads users to skip relevant information, missing valuable insights, and click on irrelevant web pages wasting time. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new summary generation technique, ReClose, which combines query‐independent and query‐biased summary techniques to improve the accuracy of users' expectations.

The authors tested the effectiveness of ReClose summaries against Google summaries by surveying 34 participants. Participants were randomly assigned to use one type of summary approach. Summary effectiveness was judged based on the accuracy of each user's expectations.

It was found that individuals using ReClose summaries showed a 10 per cent increase in the expectation accuracy over individuals using Google summaries, and therefore better user satisfaction.

The survey demonstrates the effectiveness of using ReClose summaries to improve the accuracy of user expectations.

This paper presents a novel summary generation technique called ReClose, a new approach to summary evaluation and improvements upon previously proposed summary generation techniques.

Struggling writers and students with disabilities tend to have difficulties with multiple aspects of the writing process. Therefore, in this chapter, we describe Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD; Harris, Graham, Mason, & Friedlander, 2008). SRSD is a writing intervention with extensive research demonstrating its effectiveness for improving the writing quality of struggling writers and students with disabilities when implemented by both teachers and researchers in a variety of educational settings. We also describe an ineffective writing practice, stand-alone grammar instruction. Although this type of grammar instruction is explicit, it is removed from an authentic writing context, and decades of research have demonstrated its negative effects on students’ writing quality. We close the chapter with recommendations for future research on SRSD as well as general suggestions for teachers who provide writing instruction to struggling writers and students with disabilities.

Writing, as a critical academic skill, is receiving national attention – joining the ranks of reading, mathematics, and science. The focus on increased writing performance standards for all students has implications for students with learning disabilities (LD), as these students are most likely to struggle with basic writing skills, and with expressing their ideas and demonstrating knowledge through written expression. Fortunately, research-based practices have been established for teaching students with LD across writing dimensions. In this chapter, instructional approaches for writing instruction, and current and future trends for addressing standards, are described.

The authors constructed an automatic essay scoring (AES) model in a discussion forum where the result was compared with scores given by human evaluators. This research proposes essay scoring, which is conducted through two parameters, semantic and keyword similarities, using a SentenceTransformers pre-trained model that can construct the highest vector embedding. Combining these models is used to optimize the model with increasing accuracy.

The development of the model in the study is divided into seven stages: (1) data collection, (2) pre-processing data, (3) selected pre-trained SentenceTransformers model, (4) semantic similarity (sentence pair), (5) keyword similarity, (6) calculate final score and (7) evaluating model.

The multilingual paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 and distilbert-base-multilingual-cased-v1 models got the highest scores from comparisons of 11 pre-trained multilingual models of SentenceTransformers with Indonesian data (Dhini and Girsang, 2023). Both multilingual models were adopted in this study. A combination of two parameters is obtained by comparing the response of the keyword extraction responses with the rubric keywords. Based on the experimental results, proposing a combination can increase the evaluation results by 0.2.

This study uses discussion forum data from the general biology course in online learning at the open university for the 2020.2 and 2021.2 semesters. Forum discussion ratings are still manual. In this survey, the authors created a model that automatically calculates the value of discussion forums, which are essays based on the lecturer's answers moreover rubrics.