Great Valley professor develops new grading system

For instructors, interpreting exactly what students intend to convey in their written essays can be a challenge. Roy Clariana, professor of instructional systems and academic division head of education at Penn State Great Valley, developed a text analysis software package, ALA-Reader, based on his text scoring system known as Analysis of Lexical Aggregates (ALA). The ALA-Reader converts text into a word map or picture of a student’s essay. Each student’s map is then automatically compared to the teacher’s map for analysis, which results in an objective score. This sort of fundamental research helps bring a new understanding to the linear and nonlinear nature of text and the influence of parts of speech in text, while also providing a way to visually represent the structure of students’ knowledge that is captured in their writing.