Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are a popular assessment method because they enable automated evaluation, flexible administration and use with huge groups. Despite these benefits, the manual construction of MCQs is challenging, time-consuming and error-prone. This is because each MCQ is comprised of a question called the "stem", a…

Recent developments in computerized scoring via semantic distance have provided automated assessments of verbal creativity. Here, we extend past work, applying computational linguistic approaches to characterize salient features of creative text. We hypothesize that, in addition to semantic diversity, the degree to which a story includes…

Free text answers to short questions can reflect students' mastery of concepts and their relationships relevant to learning objectives. However, automating the assessment of free text answers has been challenging due to the complexity of natural language. Existing studies often predict the scores of free text answers in a "black box"…

We introduce a short answer scoring engine made up of an ensemble of deep neural networks and a Latent Semantic Analysis-based model to score short constructed responses for a large suite of questions from a national assessment program. We evaluate the performance of the engine and show that the engine achieves above-human-level performance on a…

Purpose: The authors constructed an automatic essay scoring (AES) model in a discussion forum where the result was compared with scores given by human evaluators. This research proposes essay scoring, which is conducted through two parameters, semantic and keyword similarities, using a SentenceTransformers pre-trained model that can construct the…

The present study aims to explore how second language (L2) speakers process four types of presupposition triggers in an online self-paced reading task and an offline acceptability judgment task. The four types of triggers are definite expressions with "the," the factive verb "know," the change-of-state verb "stop" and…

Creativity is an imperative skill for today's learners, one that has important contributions to issues of inclusion and equity in education. Therefore, assessing creativity is of major importance in educational contexts. However, scoring creativity based on traditional tools suffers from subjectivity and is heavily time- and labour-consuming. This…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers methods for understanding and quantifying the similarity between written documents. Within the testing industry these methods have been used for automatic item generation, automated scoring of text and speech, modeling item characteristics, automatic question answering, machine translation, and automated…

Multiple-choice question (MCQ) plays a significant role in educational assessment. Automatic MCQ generation has been an active research area for years, and many systems have been developed for MCQ generation. Still, we could not find any system that generates accurate MCQs from school-level textbook contents that are useful in real examinations.…

Purpose: This study explores the roles of morphological skills (Morphological Awareness, Morphological-Syntactic-Knowledge,Morphological-Semantic-Knowledge, and Morphological-Orthographic/Phonological-Knowledge), vocabulary (knowledge of definitions, relationships between words, and polysemous meanings), and syntax in contributing to adolescent…

While exam-style questions are a fundamental educational tool serving a variety of purposes, manual construction of questions is a complex process that requires training, experience, and resources. This, in turn, hinders and slows down the use of educational activities (e.g. providing practice questions) and new advances (e.g. adaptive testing)…

Considerable research effort has been devoted to investigating semantic priming effects, particularly, the locus of those effects. Semantically related primes might activate their target's lexical representation (through automatic spreading activation at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), or through generation of words expected to follow…

In the traditional conception of working memory for word lists, phonological codes are used primarily, and semantic codes are often discarded or ignored. Yet, other evidence indicates an important role for semantic codes. We carried out a preplanned set of four experiments to determine whether phonological and semantic codes are used similarly or…

Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance -- including positive correlations with human creativity ratings -- additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including…

When reading Chinese, skilled native readers regularly gain a preview benefit (PB) when the parafoveal word is orthographically or semantically related to the target word. Evidence shows that non-native, beginning Chinese readers can obtain an orthographic PB during Chinese reading, which indicates the parafoveal processing of low-level visual…