AGGIE STEM hosts

WEBSITE:http://tinyurl.com/cohmetrix

PHONE:(979) 862-4665

INCluded:

• Breakfast, lunch, and hotel for one night • Check in: March 31

• March 31 : 1-5pm • April 1: 8:30am - 4:30pm

Cost: $550 TAMU Faculty & Staff and Graduate Students please contact Dr. Nite at snite@math.tamu.edu for special

pricing. A G G I E S T E M

428 Harrington Tower 4232 TAMU

College Station, TX 77845 aggiestem@tamu.edu

• Coh-Metrix is a system for qualitative analysis on computing computational cohesion and coherence metrics, in discourse theory and educational practice.

• Participants will become familiar with the structure of the Coh-Metrix and the Text Easability Assessor (TEA) tools and their applications, with particular focus on the analysis of educational data.

• Bring a small data set to work with. Deadline to sign up 2-1-17. Requires 20 participants.

March 31 - April 1 2016 College Station, Texas

To register:

Coh-Metrix Workshop

The workshop will focus on the utility of Coh-Metrix in discourse theory and educational practice. Participants will become familiar with the structure of the Coh-Metrix and Text Easability Assessor (TEA) tools and their applications, with particular focus on the analysis of educational data. Participants will learn about the various indices available in each tool, and how to interpret their significance. A review of published studies will help illustrate the relationship between discourse and learning. Participants will then be walked through a series of practical exercises that will give hands-on experience with cleaning, preparing, and analyzing texts using Coh-Metrix, conducting statistical analyses with Coh- Metrix data, and data interpretation. Prerequisites: • Bring your laptop with Firefox browser installed • Visit the Coh-Metrix (http://cohmetrix.com) and Test Easability Assessor (TEA) (http://tea.cohmetrix.com) sites to become familiar with the sites • Set up a dropbox account (https://www.dropbox.com/home) for easy access to workshop materials

• Having your preferred data analysis package (SPSS, R, stata, matlab etc.) installed and available is ideal • Bring sample texts from their own projects

o Notepad ++ can be downloaded at (http://notepad-plus-plus.org)o Text crawler can be downloaded at (http://textcrawler.en.softonic.com)

You may wish to read the following materials in preparation (available on request):

Dowell, N. M., Graesser, A. C., Zhiqiang, C. (in press). Language and discourse analysis with Coh-Metrix: Applications from educational material to learning environments at scale. Journal of Learning Analytics.

Graesser, A.C., Foltz, P., Forsyth, C., & Germany, M. (in press). Discourse and collaborative problem-solving.In Beno and Funke (Eds.) The Nature of Problem Solving. OECD series.

Graesser, A. C., McNamara, D. S., & Kulikowich, J. M. (2011). Coh-Metrix: Providing Multilevel Analyses of Text Characteristics. Educational Researcher, 40(5), 223–234.

Graesser, A. C., & McNamara, D. S. (2011). Computational Analyses of Multilevel Discourse Comprehension.Topics in Cognitive Science, 3(2), 371–398.

New Coh-Metrix Book: McNamara, D. S., Graesser, A. C., McCarthy, P. M., & Cai, Z. (2014). Automated evaluation of text and discourse with Coh-Metrix.

Cambridge, M.A.: Cambridge University Press.

Coh-Metrix Trainers

Nia Dowell is a cognitive psychology doctoral candidate at the Institute for Intelligent Systems in the University of Memphis. Her primary interests are in cognitive psychology, discourse processing and learning sciences. In general, her research focuses on using language and discourse to uncover the dynamics of socially significant, cognitive, and affective processes. She is currently applying computational techniques to model discourse and social dynamics in a variety of learning environments including teacher education programs, intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), small group computer-mediated collaborative learning environments, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Her research has also extended beyond the educational and learning sciences spaces and highlighted the practical applications of computational discourse science in the clinical, political and social sciences areas.

Tristan Nixon grew up and went to college in Toronto, Canada, where he studied Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. He has been an active member of the educational research community for over 10 years, starting with the research group at Carnegie Learning, Inc., an educational technology company in Pittsburgh, PA. Tristan’s research focuses on developing high-performance text analytics tools using the latest in cloud-computing technology. Recently he has been working as a senior programmer with the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis.