Five studies explored the ways relative rank is revealed among individuals in small groups through their natural use of pronouns. In Experiment 1, four-person groups worked on a decision-making task with randomly assigned leadership status. In Studies 2 and 3, two-person groups either worked on a task or chatted informally in a get-to-know-you session. Study 4 was a naturalistic study of incoming and outgoing e-mail of 9 participants who provided information on their correspondents’ relative status. The last study examined 40 letters written by soldiers in the regime of Saddam Hussein. Computerized text analyses across the five studies found that people with higher status consistently used fewer first-person singular, and more first-person plural and second-person singular pronouns. Natural language use during group interaction suggests that status is associated with attentional biases, such that higher rank is linked with other-focus whereas lower rank is linked with self-focus.

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We investigated the impact of a Web tutor on college students' critical stance and learning while exploring Web pages on science. Critical stance is an aspect of self-regulated learning that emphasizes the need to evaluate the truth and relevance of information as the learner engages in systematic inquiry to answer challenging questions. The Web tutor is called SEEK, an acronym for Source, Evidence, Explanation, and Knowledge. The SEEK Tutor was designed to promote a critical stance through several facilities in a computer environment: spoken hints on a mock Google™ search page, on-line ratings on the reliability of particular Web sites, and a structured note-taking facility that prompted them to reflect on the quality of particular Web sites. We conducted two experiments that trained students how to take a critical stance and that tracked their behavior while exploring Web pages on plate tectonics to research the causes of the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens. The SEEK Tutor did improve critical stance, as manifested in essays on the causes of the volcanic eruption, and did yield learning gains for some categories of information (compared with comparison conditions). However, many measures were unaffected by either the presence of the SEEK Tutor or by prior training on critical stance. We anticipate that robust improvements on critical stance and learning will require more training and/or some expert feedback and interactive scaffolding of critical stance in the context of specific examples.

Discourse cohesion is presumably an important facilitator of comprehension when individuals read texts and holdconversations. This study investigated components of cohesion and language in different types of discourse about Newtonian physics: A textbook, textoids written by experimental psychologists, naturalistic tutorial dialogue between expert human tutors and college students, and AutoTutor tutorial dialogue between a computer tutor and students (AutoTutor is an animated pedagogical agent that helps students learn about physics by holding conversations in natural language). We analyzed the four types of discourse with Coh-Metrix, a software tool that measures discourse on different components of cohesion, language, and readability. The cohesion indices included co-reference, syntactic and semantic similarity, causal cohesion, incidence of cohesion signals (e.g., connectives, logical operators), and many other measures. Cohesion data were quite similar for the two forms of discourse in expository monologue (textbooks and textoids) and for the two types of tutorial dialogue (i.e., students interacting with human tutors and AutoTutor), but very different between the discourse of expository monologue and tutorial dialogue. Coh-Metrix was also able to detect subtle differences in the language and discourse of AutoTutor versus human tutoring. Arthur C. Graesser et al. • Discourse cohesion in text and tutorial dialogue idj 15(3), 2007, 199-213 Arthur C. Graesser et al. • Discourse cohesion in text and tutorial dialogue idj 15(

This study aims to investigate the text difficulty of the reading materials of Korean middle school English textbooks with Coh-Metrix, a software developed by the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis to analyze the linguistic and psycholinguistic features of English text and textbooks with a wide range of indices on cohesion and language. In this study, the textbook corpus consisted of the text files extracted from 13 English textbooks. These files were used for analyzing the text difficulty among grades with Coh-Metrix. The Coh-Metrix indices selected for this study contained basic counts, word frequency, word features, lexical diversity, pronouns, connectives, readability, syntax complexity, syntax similarity, reference cohesion, semantic cohesion, and situation model measures. The results showed that there were significant differences among grades for basic counts, word features, first pronouns, causal and temporal connectives, readability, reference and semantic cohesion, the number of words before main verbs, syntactic similarity, and situation model measures. The differences among grades, however, were not significant for word frequency, lexical diversity, second and third person pronouns, additive connectives, and NP density measures. The findings have educational implications for textbook design and language learning for English learners.