This paper introduces REFLECTSUMM, a novel summarization dataset specifically designed for summarizing students' reflective writing. The goal of REFLECTSUMM is to facilitate developing and evaluating novel summarization techniques tailored to real-world scenarios with little training data, with potential implications in the opinion summarization…

Evaluating the quality of university exam papers is crucial for universities seeking institutional and program accreditation. Currently, exam papers are assessed manually, a process that can be tedious, lengthy, and in some cases, inconsistent. This is often due to the focus on assessing only the formal specifications of exam papers. This study…

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the education landscape and has been widely applied to language teaching and learning. This study investigates the transformative potential of AI-driven Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools in enhancing writing proficiency, focusing on language precision, content summarization, and creative writing…

Constructing arguments is essential in science subjects like chemistry. For example, students in organic chemistry should learn to argue about the plausibility of competing chemical reactions by including various sources of evidence and justifying the derived information with reasoning. While doing so, students face significant challenges in…

This dissertation explores the relationship between language production processes and recorded typing behaviors among native speakers of English writing in their native language. Typing is quite prevalent in modern societies, as its use is becoming increasingly required in professional and personal settings but it remains largely understudied in…

There is a current debate about the extent to which ChatGPT, a natural language AI chatbot, can disrupt processes in higher education settings. The chatbot is capable of not only answering queries in a human-like way within seconds but can also provide long tracts of texts which can be in the form of essays, emails, and coding. In this study, in…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

The study highlights ChatGPT-4's potential in educational settings for the evaluation of university students' open-ended written examination responses. ChatGPT-4 evaluated 54 written responses, ranging from 24 to 256 words in English. It assessed each response using five criteria and assigned a grade on a six-point scale from fail to excellent,…

Effective writing feedback is a powerful tool for enhancing student learning, encouraging revision, and increasing motivation and agency. Yet, teachers face many challenges that prevent them from consistently providing effective writing feedback. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have led educators and researchers to…

Rater comments tend to be qualitatively analyzed to indicate raters' application of rating scales. This study applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to quantify meaningful, behavioral information from a corpus of rater comments and triangulated that information with a many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) analysis of rater scores. The…

This study provides a comparative assessment of the capabilities of leading artificial intelligence (AI) tools and human participants in a business management education context. Specifically, we (a) assess how well current language models perform in providing answers to standardised essay-type assessments in a business and management education…

This paper presents a multidimensional model of variation in writing quality, register, and genre in student essays, trained and tested via confirmatory factor analysis of 1.37 million essay submissions to ETS' digital writing service, Criterion®. The model was also validated with several other corpora, which indicated that it provides a…

Purpose: This study examines the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly ChatGPT, on higher education (HE). The ease with which content can be generated using GenAI has raised concerns across academia regarding its role in academic contexts, particularly regarding summative assessments. This research makes a unique…

Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

The value of generative AI tools in higher education has received considerable attention. Although there are many proponents of its value as a learning tool, many are concerned with the issues regarding academic integrity and its use by students to compose written assessments. This study evaluates and compares the output of three commonly used…