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…

Ethical considerations, including transparency, play an important role when using artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Explainable AI has been coined as a solution to provide more insight into the inner workings of AI algorithms. However, carefully designed user studies on how to design explanations for AI in education are still limited. The…

The benefits of writing strategy feedback are well established. This study examined the extent to which adding spelling and grammar checkers support writing and revision in comparison to providing writing strategy feedback alone. High school students (n = 119) wrote and revised six persuasive essays in Writing Pal, an automated writing evaluation…

This study examined a naturalistic, districtwide implementation of an automated writing evaluation (AWE) software program called "MI Write" in elementary schools. We specifically examined the degree to which aspects of MI Write were implemented, teacher and student attitudes towards MI Write, and whether MI Write usage along with other…

This study examined a naturalistic, districtwide implementation of an automated writing evaluation (AWE) software program called "MI Write" in elementary schools. We specifically examined the degree to which aspects of MI Write were implemented, teacher and student attitudes towards MI Write, and whether MI Write usage along with other…

Our study examines written corrective feedback generated by two online grammar checkers (GCs), Grammarly and Virtual Writing Tutor, and by the grammar checking function of Microsoft Word. We tested the technology on a wide range of grammatical error types from two sources: a set of authentic ESL compositions and a series of simple sentences we…

Writing essays and receiving feedback can be useful for fostering students' learning and motivation. When faced with large class sizes, it is desirable to identify students who might particularly benefit from feedback. In this article, we tested the potential of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for identifying poor essays. A total of 14 teaching…

Writing skills are considered essential to lifelong success, yet experts cannot agree on one model or set of traits that distinguishes good writing from poor writing. Instructional strategies in developing student writing at the high school level need to include a means by which students receive immediate, specific feedback that acts as a scaffold…

Automated assessment technologies have been used in education for decades (e.g., computerised multiple choice tests). In contrast, Automated Essay Grading (AEG) technologies: have existed for decades; are "good in theory" (e.g., as accurate as humans, temporally and financially efficient, and can enhance formative feedback), and yet; are…

The hurried pace of the modern classroom does not permit formative feedback on writing assignments at the frequency or quality recommended by the research literature. One solution for increasing individual feedback to students is to incorporate some form of computer-generated assessment. This study explores the use of automated assessment of…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to score student essays and support revision. We studied how an AWE program called MY Access![R] was used in eight middle schools in Southern California over a three-year period. Although many teachers and students considered automated scoring unreliable, and teachers'…

The 13th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) was originally arranged to take place in Ifrane, Morocco. Due to the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) epidemic, EDM 2020, as well as most other academic conferences in 2020, had to be changed to a purely online format. To facilitate efficient transmission of…

Studied the use of an automated grader to score essays holistically and by rating traits through two experiments that evaluated 807 Web-based essays and then compared 386 essays to evaluations by 6 human raters. Results show the essay grading software to be efficient and able to grade about six documents a second. (SLD)

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is defined as the computer technology that evaluates and scores the written prose (Shermis & Barrera, 2002; Shermis & Burstein, 2003; Shermis, Raymat, & Barrera, 2003). AES systems are mainly used to overcome time, cost, reliability, and generalizability issues in writing assessment (Bereiter, 2003; Burstein,…