Writing Assessment and Linguistic Patterns in University Student Narratives

This study examines the relationship between writing performance, assessed with the Early Writing Alert System (SISAT), and linguistic patterns in student narratives from one public and one private university in northeastern Mexico. Variables such as lexical density and richness, text volume, and thematic progression were analyzed to explore how institutional context influences narrative writing and its assessment. A non-experimental, descriptive–comparative design with interpretive triangulation was employed. The corpus comprised 148 narratives produced over three academic periods, analyzed using automated linguistic tools alongside SISAT scores. Descriptive statistics, Spearman correlations, and Kruskal–Wallis tests were applied to examine differences between the two institutions and across periods. The results indicate intermediate performance at both universities, with differentiated patterns: at the public university, lexical richness and density positively correlated with SISAT scores, while greater text volume was negatively associated; at the private university, both text length and diversity were positively related, though excessive lexical density appeared counterproductive. No statistically significant differences were observed between periods or between the two universities. Our findings highlight that quantitative linguistic indicators complement normative assessment and underscore the role of institutional context in writing development. The study also emphasizes the formative and expressive functions of narrative writing, supporting pedagogical strategies that integrate automated assessment with qualitative analysis to foster self-regulation, symbolic expression, and ethical reflection.