We investigated the relationship between the scores assigned by an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) system, the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), and grades allocated by trained, professional human raters to English essay writing by instigating two procedures novel to written-language assessment: the logistic transformation of AES raw scores into…

An automated essay scoring (AES) program is a software system that uses techniques from corpus and computational linguistics and machine learning to grade essays. In this study, we aimed to describe and evaluate particular language features of Coh-Metrix for a novel AES program that would score junior and senior high school students' essays from…

The rating of proficiency tests that use the Inter-agency Roundtable (ILR) and American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines claims that each major level is based on hierarchal linguistic functions that require mastery of multidimensional traits in such a way that each level subsumes the levels beneath it. These…

The quality of sign language interpreting (SLI) is a gripping construct among practitioners, educators and researchers, calling for reliable and valid assessment. There has been a diverse array of methods in the extant literature to measure SLI quality, ranging from traditional error analysis to recent rubric scoring. In this study, we want to…

The use of corpora and corpus linguistic methods in language testing research is increasing at an accelerated pace. The growing body of language testing research that uses corpus linguistic data is a testament to their utility in test development and validation. Although there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of using corpus data…

The scoring of constructed responses may introduce construct-irrelevant factors to a test score and affect its validity and fairness. Fatigue is one of the factors that could negatively affect human performance in general, yet little is known about its effects on a human rater's scoring quality on constructed responses. In this study, we compared…

This review departs from current practice in reviewing tests in that it employs an "argument-based approach" to test validation to guide the review (e.g. Bachman, 2005; Kane, 2006; Mislevy, Steinberg, & Almond, 2002). Specifically, it follows an approach to test development and use that Bachman and Palmer (2010) call the process of "assessment…

This paper compares two alternative scoring methods--multiple regression and classification trees--for an automated speech scoring system used in a practice environment. The two methods were evaluated on two criteria: construct representation and empirical performance in predicting human scores. The empirical performance of the two scoring models…

Scores assigned by trained raters and by an automated scoring system (SpeechRater[TM]) on the speaking section of the TOEFL iBT[TM] were validated against a communicative competence criterion. Specifically, a sample of 555 undergraduate students listened to speech samples from 184 examinees who took the Test of English as a Foreign Language…

This study piloted test items that will be used in a computer-delivered and scored test of productive grammatical ability in English as a second language (ESL). Findings from research on learners' development of morphosyntactic, syntactic, and functional knowledge were synthesized to create a framework of grammatical features. We outline the…

E-rater[R] is an automated essay scoring system that uses natural language processing techniques to extract features from essays and to model statistically human holistic ratings. Educational Testing Service has investigated the use of e-rater, in conjunction with human ratings, to score one of the two writing tasks on the TOEFL-iBT[R] writing…