Written answers to open-ended questions can have a higher long-term effect on learning than multiple-choice questions. However, it is critical that teachers immediately review the answers, and ask to redo those that are incoherent. This can be a difficult task and can be time-consuming for teachers. A possible solution is to automate the detection…

We used multivariate generalizability theory to examine the reliability of hand-scoring and automated essay scoring (AES) and to identify how these scoring methods could be used in conjunction to optimize writing assessment. Students (n = 113) included subsamples of struggling writers and non-struggling writers in Grades 3-5 drawn from a larger…

Machines have a long-demonstrated ability to find statistical relationships between qualities of texts and surface-level linguistic indicators of writing. More recently, unlocked by artificial intelligence, the potential of using machines to identify content-related writing trait criteria has been uncovered. This development is significant,…

The Common Core assessments emphasize short essay constructed response items over multiple choice items because they are more precise measures of understanding. However, such items are too costly and time consuming to be used in national assessments unless a way is found to score them automatically. Current automatic essay scoring techniques are…

Automated scoring by means of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been introduced lately to improve the traditional human scoring system. The purposes of the present study were to develop a LSA-based assessment system to evaluate children's Chinese sentence construction skills and to examine the effectiveness of LSA-based automated scoring function…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…