Current approaches used in educational research and practice to evaluate the quality of written arguments often rely on structural analysis. In such assessments, credit is awarded for the presence of structural elements of an argument, such as claims, evidence, and rebuttals. In this article, we discuss limitations of such approaches, including…

Multilingual summative assessments face significant challenges due to tensions that exist between multiple language provision and comparability. Yet, conventional approaches for investigating comparability in multilingual assessments fail to accommodate assessments that comprise extended responses that target complex constructs. This article…

Automated essay scoring (AES), where natural language processing is applied to score written text, can underpin educational resources in blended and distance learning. AES performance has typically been reported in terms of correlation coefficients or agreement statistics calculated between a system and an expert human examiner. We describe the…

There is a current debate about the extent to which ChatGPT, a natural language AI chatbot, can disrupt processes in higher education settings. The chatbot is capable of not only answering queries in a human-like way within seconds but can also provide long tracts of texts which can be in the form of essays, emails, and coding. In this study, in…

Background: The history essay, and historical writing, are crucial forms of assessment in History throughout primary and high school education. This article draws from an autoethnography of teachings in a pre-service history teachers' school classroom. This article discusses obstacles students experience in conceptualising and writing the history…

The present study explores two rating methods for peer assessment (analytical rating using criteria and comparative judgement) in light of concurrent validity, reliability and insufficient diagnosticity (i.e. the degree to which substandard work is recognised by the peer raters). During a second-year undergraduate course, students wrote a one-page…

Assessment is often used to promote learning, but the mechanisms of how assessment relates to epistemology -- knowledge and knowing -- have been scarcely studied and theorised. In this study, we examine students' epistemic resources in relation assessment in the context of university mathematics education. We draw on the theoretical framework of…

To become effective learners, students need to develop good evaluative judgment skills. Unfortunately, numerous studies find that self-evaluation estimates provided by undergraduates often differ significantly from the marks awarded by the tutor. This suggests that students either have a rather poor grasp of the assessment criteria, or they find…

The present study adopted a praxis orientation to second language (L2) research and pedagogy to explore the professional development needs of three English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers after their first attempt at implementing dynamic assessment (DA) of essay writing. To date, few studies have examined how teachers learn to implement DA,…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

The upsurge of ICT media and hybrid modalities for learning that stemmed from the world health crisis seem to be destined to stay. In this new paradigm, self-assessment processes have acquired an even more relevant role in the teaching learning process than they already had. Due to the myriad of academic online resources and information at their…

Lexical proficiency in a second language (L2) has long been effectively assessed through the measurement of various lexical indices, or textual characteristics that act as observable indicators of such conceptual categories as lexical richness, diversity, sophistication, and fluency. While many studies have established links between these lexical…

The proliferation of large language models represents a paradigm shift in the landscape of automated essay scoring (AES) systems, fundamentally elevating their accuracy and efficacy. This study presents an extensive examination of large language models, with a particular emphasis on the transformative influence of transformer-based models, such as…

The aim of this study was to identify process-related indicators for grading group essays. The research participants were students registered in a teacher-training course using an instructional design with face-to-face and digital blended learning. The course required the students in small collaborative groups to design, implement, and evaluate a…

Educationalists have had serious problems in proposing well-grounded ways of teaching critical thinking. Reviews of the field have called for research to develop theory concerning the learning experience associated with critical thinking enhancement, as well as to explore more tailored teaching and evaluation methods. This article suggests an…