# An Exploratory Study of Argumentative Writing by Young Students: A Transformer-based Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09873 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09873/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Practical and Ethical Challenges of Large Language Models in Education: A Systematic Scoping Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13379/) (2023)
- [Automated Evaluation for Student Argumentative Writing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04083/) (2022)
- [The Life Cycle of Large Language Models: A Review of Biases in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11203/) (2024)
- ["Sharks are not the threat humans are": Argument Component Segmentation in School Student Essays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04518/) (2021)
- [NLU for Game-based Learning in Real: Initial Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13754/) (2022)
- [Learning from Auxiliary Sources in Argumentative Revision Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07334/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a computational exploration of argument critique writing by young students. Middle school students were asked to criticize an argument presented in the prompt, focusing on identifying and explaining the reasoning flaws. This task resembles an established college-level argument critique task. Lexical and discourse features that utilize detailed domain knowledge to identify critiques exist for the college task but do not perform well on the young students data. Instead, transformer-based architecture (e.g., BERT) fine-tuned on a large corpus of critique essays from the college task performs much better (over 20% improvement in F1 score). Analysis of the performance of various configurations of the system suggests that while children's writing does not exhibit the standard discourse structure of an argumentative essay, it does share basic local sequential structures with the more mature writers.