Automated Essay Scoring (AES) can reliably grade essays at scale and reduce human effort in both classroom and commercial settings. There are currently three dominant supervised learning paradigms for building AES models: feature-based, neural, and hybrid. While feature-based models are more explainable, neural network models often outperform…

Automated writing evaluation systems can improve students' writing insofar as students attend to the feedback provided and revise their essay drafts in ways aligned with such feedback. Existing research on revision of argumentative writing in such systems, however, has focused on the types of revisions students make (e.g., surface vs. content)…

Literacy standards increasingly emphasize the importance of analytic text-based writing. Little consensus exists, however, around what high-quality student responses should look like in this genre. In this study, we investigated fifth-grade students' writing in response to analytic text-based writing tasks (15 teachers, 44 writing tasks, 88 pieces…

Despite the importance of analytic text-based writing, relatively little is known about how to teach to this important skill. A persistent barrier to conducting research that would provide insight on best practices for teaching this form of writing is a lack of outcome measures that assess students' analytic text-based writing development and that…

An increased emphasis on writing standards has led many U.S. states to incorporate on-demand writing assessments into their test-based accountability system. We argue this creates political and pedagogical tensions for teachers to navigate. We discuss how rubric conceptualization (1) is a process wherein a teacher iteratively (co-)constructs…

We investigate students' implementation of the feedback messages they received in an automated writing evaluation system ("eRevise") that aims to improve students' use of text evidence in their writing. Seven 5th and 6th-grade teachers implemented "eRevise" (n = 143 students). Qualitative analysis of students' essays across…

Recent English Language Arts standards emphasize teaching students to use text evidence to support their claims and opinions; yet, students often struggle to do so effectively in their writing. To help students develop this skill, clearer understanding of what effective evidence use entails and targeted feedback to guide students' writing…

This paper presents an investigation of score prediction based on natural language processing for two targeted constructs within analytic text-based writing: 1) students' effective use of evidence and, 2) their organization of ideas and evidence in support of their claim. With the long-term goal of producing feedback for students and teachers, we…

An increased emphasis on writing standards has recently led many U.S. states to incorporate text-based writing assessments into their test-based accountability system. This creates political and pedagogical tensions that teachers must navigate in their classroom use of writing rubrics. While prior research has focused on rubric design and/or the…