Topical structure analysis as an assessment tool in student academic writing

Abstract

In an attempt to establish the validity of Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) as an assessment tool in student academic writing, this study applies TSA in both high- and low-rated comparison-and-contrast essays. Following Simpson’s (2000) model, the study consists of two parts. The first part quantitatively describes the physical structure of freshman college students’ high- and low-quality comparison-and-contrast essays, and the second part presents how the topical development is carried out in the said essays. Results show that although there is a remarkable parallel preference of topical progressions between the two groups of data, over 60 percent of independent clauses in the low-quality writing introduce new topics compared to less than 50 percent in high-quality writing samples. Two-proportion z-test shows that the difference is significant, p=.012 <.05. Therefore, it may be inferred that low-quality writing tends to introduce more new topics in the independent clauses than in high-quality writing.