Discussion analysis provides a closer look at how your students participate in discussions. As you grade a discussion, you can use these metrics to help determine a grade:
- Substantive posts: The number of responses and replies that contribute to the discussion's development. A post is deemed "substantive" based on word count and word variety. These posts show critical thinking or advanced composition.
- Sentence complexity: Average grade level readability for the student's posts using the Flesch-Kincaid linguistic standard which uses both sentence complexity, sentence length, and word length.
- Lexical variation: Count of content words and functional words. Content words support the student's ideas, while functional words support proper grammar.
- Critical thinking level: Percentage of words and phrases within a student's total posts that demonstrate critical thinking.
- Word variation: Percentage of unique words in a student's responses and replies.
- Discussion details: responses, replies, and average word count for each student and the class average
These metrics are only visible to instructors. They are not intended to translate directly to a grade but rather to provide you with analysis that might contribute to the grade achieved. Learn more about the discussion analysis metrics.