MYSUPERVISOR: A PROGRAM TO AID STEM STUDENTS IN ACADEMIC WRITING

During writing courses, many students acknowledge the usefulness and effect of certain strategies to improve writing but find it difficult to remember and /or apply them. Therefore, we present a newly developed grammar and style program, MySupervisor, to aid graduate STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students in implementing writing strategies learned in an academic writing course. The program is not an editor that corrects the text for students; rather, the main goal of the tool is to give students’ long-term guidance after receiving instruction so they can improve their own texts. The program marks types of words such as wordy language, nouns and verbs, so students can then focus on the corresponding problem (e.g. use of count and noncount nouns, a/an/the, noun compounds, tense, active/passive voice, and verb choice). In addition to the program, we will also present a pilot study that is being conducted this winter semester (2020) to investigate and assess how integrating this technology affects students’ writing outcomes. The pilot will compare students’ time and number of corrections in writing outcomes performed manually or with the automated program. We will also present the results of a questionnaire asking for student feedback about whether the program was useful, and how the program can be improved.