Background: Learners' writing skills are critical to their academic and professional development. Previous studies have shown that learners' self-assessment during writing is essential for assessing their writing products and monitoring their writing processes. However, conducting practical self-assessments of writing remains challenging for…

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,…

Undergraduate students' experience of assessment in universities is usually of summative assessment which provides only limited information to help students improve their performance. By contrast, formative assessment is informative and forward-looking, possessing the leverage to inform students of their day-to-day progress and inform teachers of…

In fall 2010, the University of Massachusetts Amherst instituted a new upper-division General Education requirement, the Integrative Experience (IE), designed to help students integrate the various components of their undergraduate experience and reflect upon their learning and development as a result of those experiences, both key dimensions of…

This paper reports the design of learning-oriented formative assessments in an EFL writing course that involved learners in regularly responding to teacher feedback. Following major assessment and feedback frameworks developed recently, these formative assessments were explicated in three aspects: the scheduling of learning and assessment…

This article relates the efforts of faculty at one community college to define standards for achievement of two SLOs (critical thinking and effective communication) and to gather and analyze evidence of how well students meet those standards. Faculty from 13 disciplines assessed writing samples from 265 students. We found that, in general,…

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…

The aim of the study was to look at the effectiveness of combining a variety of teaching and learning methods in an attempt to facilitate students' understanding of assessment criteria. Fifty-three psychology students were asked to complete the mismatch exercise (Norton et al., 2002), and a booklet entitled "Your Assignment results and how to…