Manually scoring and revising student essays has long been a time-consuming task for educators. With the rise of natural language processing techniques, automated essay scoring (AES) and automated essay revising (AER) have emerged to alleviate this burden. However, current AES and AER models require large amounts of training data and lack…

Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e., training classifiers or fine-tuning language models on a small number of responses with human-provided score…

Studies on automatic scoring systems in writing assessments have also evaluated the relationship between human and machine scores for the reliability of automated essay scoring systems. This study investigated the magnitudes of indices for inter-rater agreement and discrepancy, especially regarding human and machine scoring, in writing assessment.…

In Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems, many previous works have studied group fairness using the demographic features of essay writers. However, individual fairness also plays an important role in fair evaluation and has not been yet explored. Initialized by Dwork et al., the fundamental concept of individual fairness is "similar people…

This study explores using transfer learning in machine learning for natural language processing (NLP) to create generic automated essay scoring (AES) models, providing instant online scoring for statewide writing assessments in K-12 education. The goal is to develop an instant online scorer that is generalizable to any prompt, addressing the…

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini, has significantly impacted the educational landscape, offering unique opportunities for learning and assessment. In the realm of written assessment grading, traditionally viewed as a laborious and subjective process, this study sought to…

Purpose: This study builds a new system for automatically assessing learners' speech elicited from an oral discourse completion task (DCT), and evaluates the prediction capability of the system with a view to better understanding factors deemed influential in predicting speaking proficiency scores and the pedagogical implications of the system.…

Performance in elementary cognitive tasks is moderately correlated with fluid intelligence and working memory capacity. These correlations are higher for more complex tasks, presumably due to increased demands on working memory capacity. In accordance with the binding hypothesis, which states that working memory capacity reflects the limit of a…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to advance the use of structured, monologic discourse analysis by validating an automated scoring procedure for core lexicon (CoreLex) using transcripts. Method: Forty-nine transcripts from persons with aphasia and 48 transcripts from persons with no brain injury were retrieved from the AphasiaBank database. Five…

Managing crowded classes in terms of classroom assessment is a difficult task due to the amount of time which needs to be devoted to providing feedback to student products. In this respect, the present study aimed to develop an automated essay scoring environment as a potential means to overcome this problem. Secondarily, the study aimed to test…

This convergent mixed method study aimed at exploring the English context of the widely used Emirates Standardized Test (EmSAT) by juxtaposing it to its sequel, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). For this purpose, the study used the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) international standards which is used as a…

Recent advances in machine learning have made automated scoring of learner speech widespread, and yet validation research that provides support for applying automated scoring technology to assessment is still in its infancy. Both the educational measurement and language assessment communities have called for greater transparency in describing…

Two experiments tracked the encoding of relational information (actions at the level of the prelinguistic message and verbs at the level of the sentence) during formulation of transitive event descriptions (e.g., The tiger is scratching the photographer). At what point during message and sentence formulation do speakers encode actions and verbs?…

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 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- often called "The Nation's Report Card" -- is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what students in public and private schools in the United States know and can do in various subjects and has provided policy makers and the public with invaluable…