The development of explanations for scientific phenomena is crucial in science assessment. However, the scoring of students' written explanations is a challenging and resource-intensive process. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to address these challenges, particularly when the explanations are written in English, an…

Middle school students struggle to explain thermodynamics concepts. In this study, to help students succeed, we use a natural language processing program to analyze their essays explaining the aspects of thermodynamics and provide guidance based on the automated score. The 346 sixth-grade students were assigned to either the critique condition…