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…

Remote online second language (L2) writing instruction, in general, and remote online L2 writing assessment, in particular, require a holistic structural approach that results in improving students' L2 writing, as well as offering an authentic and fair assessment of students' L2 writing performance. The study described in this paper employed a…

Background and aims: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tele-health has gained popularity for both providing services and delivering assessments to children with disabilities. In this manuscript, we discuss the process of collecting standardized oral language, reading, and writing tele-assessment data with early elementary children with autism spectrum…

Language assessment is one of the key factors affecting language learning contexts since it not only provides information about the learners and teachers' performance in the classroom but also shapes how languages are learned and practiced depending on how assessment is conducted. Technology, different learner profiles, problems with the existing…

Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind and social constructivism, and adopting a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach, this study explored the impact of online dynamic assessment (DA) on EFL learners' academic writing skills through one-on-one individual and online synchronous DA sessions over Google Docs. It also investigated…

Literacy educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of increasing students' writing proficiency across age and grade levels. With the release of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a new and greater emphasis is being placed on writing in the K-12 curriculum. Educators, as well as the authors of the CCSS, agree that…

This paper explores automated methods for measuring features of student writing and determining their relationship to writing quality and other features of literacy, such as reading rest scores. In particular, it uses the "e-rater"™ automatic essay scoring system to measure "product" features (measurable traits of the final…

Summary writing is an important part of many English Language Examinations. As grading students' summary writings is a very time-consuming task, computer-assisted assessment will help teachers carry out the grading more effectively. Several techniques such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), n-gram co-occurrence and BLEU have been proposed to…

We investigate students' negative perceptions about an online peer assessment system for undergraduate writing across the disciplines. Specifically, we consider the nature of students' resistance to peer assessment; what factors influence that resistance; and how students' perceptions impact their revision work. We do this work by first examining…

Writing and the teaching of writing is changing at a rapid pace. How can educators understand writing assessment "as" and "with" technology in the 21st-century classroom? Michael Neal contends that new technologies are neither the problem nor the solution. Instead, educators need to tap into digital resources only inasmuch as they promote writing…

Advances in assessment technologies are affording teachers and students new ways to efficiently assess and track achievement while also better promoting learning. WriteToLearn is one such technology, a Web-based tool that integrates practice and assessment in reading comprehension with writing about what is learned. Based on the principle of…

Within large scale educational assessment agencies in the UK, there has been a shift towards assessors marking digitally scanned copies rather than the original paper scripts that were traditionally used. This project uses extended essay examination scripts to consider whether the mode in which an essay is read potentially influences the…

Developers of the Intelligent Essay Assessor claim that it saves time in evaluating college students' essays and improves the assessment. This and the growing number of other automated grading programs use the same technologies that make computer-based tutoring possible. Many academics remain skeptical of grading technologies, citing the…

This study was designed to address two frequent criticisms of the SAT essay--that essay length is the best predictor of scores, and that there is an advantage in using more "sophisticated" examples as opposed to personal experience. The study was based on 2,820 essays from the first three administrations of the new SAT. Each essay was…

Describes Apex (Assistant for Preparing Exams), a tool for evaluating student essays based on their content. By comparing an essay and the text of a given course on a semantic basis, the system can measure how well the essay matches the text. Various assessments are presented to the student regarding the topic, outline, and coherence of the essay.…