Human essay grading is a laborious task that can consume much time and effort. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has thus been proposed as a fast and effective solution to the problem of grading student writing at scale. However, because AES typically uses supervised machine learning, a human-graded essay corpus is still required to train the AES…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) tools aim to improve the efficiency and consistency of essay scoring by using machine learning algorithms. In the existing research work on this topic, most researchers agree that human-automated score agreement remains the benchmark for assessing the accuracy of machine-generated scores. To measure the performance of…

The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots has created a great deal of discussion in the education community. While many have gravitated towards the ability of these bots to make learning more interactive, others have grave concerns that student created essays, long used as a means of assessing the subject comprehension of students, may…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) can reliably grade essays at scale and reduce human effort in both classroom and commercial settings. There are currently three dominant supervised learning paradigms for building AES models: feature-based, neural, and hybrid. While feature-based models are more explainable, neural network models often outperform…

This quasi-experimental study seeks to improve the conceptual quality of summary essays by comparing two conditions, essay prompts with or without a list of 13 broad concepts, the concepts were selected across a continuum of the 100 most frequent words in the lesson materials. It is anticipated that only the most central concepts will be used as…

This study reports the integrated findings of a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study that investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of mobile-based writing tools (MBWTs) as well as gender differences that emerged from these learning effects in the narrative writing skills of a group of sixth to seventh grade Latinx English Learners…

This study compared the effects of teacher feedback (TF) and online automated feedback (AF) on the quality of revision of English writing. It also examined the strengths and weaknesses of the two types of feedback perceived by English language learners (ELLs) as a foreign language (FL). Sixty-eight Chinese students from two English classes…

Writing a good essay typically involves students revising an initial paper draft after receiving feedback. We present eRevise, a web-based writing and revising environment that uses natural language processing features generated for rubric-based essay scoring to trigger formative feedback messages regarding students' use of evidence in…

With the integration of new technologies in the foreign language classroom, the practice of collaborative writing has gained renewed attention, although some questions still remain unanswered regarding the extent to which these tools help learners in their writing when compared to more traditional learning contexts (Elola & Oskoz, 2010). In…

No significant body of research examines writing achievement and the specific skills and knowledge in the writing domain for postsecondary (college) students in the U.S., even though many at-risk students lack the prerequisite writing skills required to persist in their education. This paper addresses this gap through a novel…

Automated essay scoring tools are often criticized on the basis of construct validity. Specifically, it has been argued that computational scoring algorithms may be unaligned to higher-level indicators of quality writing, such as writers' demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the essay topics. In this paper, we consider how and whether the…

The use of online translation (OT) is increasing as more pupils receive laptops from their schools. This study investigates OT use in two groups of Swedish pupils (ages 17-18) studying Spanish as an L3: one group (A) having free Internet access and the spelling and grammar checker of Microsoft Word, the other group (B) using printed dictionaries…

Many intensive English language programmes that English second language (ESL) students enrol in adopt a process approach to writing, interpreting writing as a cognitive process that is highly private or individualistic (Atkinson, 2003), where writers use specific cognitive phases, such as pre-writing, drafting, and revising, to generate their…

This paper describes ongoing work in automated essay scoring that will extend the applicability of models that are currently used for short-essay documents (i.e., less than 500 words). Sponsored by the Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), the project would create norms for documents that might normally be found in an…

This presentation explored the nature of hypertextual or electronically enhanced essays. The purpose of the presentation was to illustrate the change in academic writing which is occurring because of electronic text forms and hyper-linking. The author attempted to show that academic writing (and the culture surrounding writing) is becoming more…