There is increasing interest in using factor scores in structural equation models and there have been numerous methodological papers on the topic. Nevertheless, sum scores, which are computed from adding up item responses, continue to be ubiquitous in practice. It is therefore important to compare simulation results involving factor scores to…

This study examines the potential to use non-expert, crowd-sourced raters to score essays by comparing expert raters' and crowd-sourced raters' assessments of writing quality. Expert raters and crowd-sourced raters scored 400 essays using a standardised holistic rubric and comparative judgement (pairwise ratings) scoring techniques, respectively.…

In automated essay scoring (AES) systems, similarity techniques are used to compute the score for student answers. Several methods to compute similarity have emerged over the years. However, only a few of them have been widely used in the AES domain. This work shows the findings of a ten-year review on similarity techniques applied in AES systems…

In this article, we argue that automated scoring engines should be transparent and construct relevant--that is, as much as is currently feasible. Many current automated scoring engines cannot achieve high degrees of scoring accuracy without allowing in some features that may not be easily explained and understood and may not be obviously and…

We investigated the relationship between the scores assigned by an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) system, the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), and grades allocated by trained, professional human raters to English essay writing by instigating two procedures novel to written-language assessment: the logistic transformation of AES raw scores into…

This column describes the game of Royal Pickles -- a "King of the Court'' variation of pickleball that removes the bored spectator element from the class and creates a solution for the challenge of having too many students and not enough court space.

The purpose of this study was to investigate which of the available Spanish sentence tests U.S. audiologists currently utilize to evaluate Spanish-speaking cochlear implant candidates. An online questionnaire was created and distributed nationwide. A total of 25 audiologists reported using the Spanish HINT and Spanish AzBio. Limitations regarding…

This paper describes the development of the "Flourishing Classroom System Observation Framework and Rubric," which provides a framework and practical approach to defining and describing multiple interconnected observable characteristics of a classroom system that individually and together can be targeted to cultivate collective…

Generative artificial intelligence technologies, such as ChatGPT, bring an unprecedented change in education by leveraging the power of natural language processing and machine learning. Employing ChatGPT to assist with marking written assessment presents multiple advantages including scalability, improved consistency, eliminating biases associated…

It is widely recognised that feedback is an important part of learning: effective feedback should result in a meaningful change in student behaviour (Morris et al., 2021). However, individual feedback takes time to produce, and for large cohorts -- typified by the North of 300 challenge in computing (CPHC, 2019), it can be difficult to do so in a…

Quantitative measures of systematic differences in OSCE scoring across examiners (often termed examiner stringency) can threaten the validity of examination outcomes. Such effects are usually conceptualised and operationalised based solely on checklist/domain scores in a station, and global grades are not often used in this type of analysis. In…

Concept mapping is widely used as a tool for assessing students' understanding of science. To fully realize the diagnostic potential of concept mapping, a scoring method that not only provides an objective and accurate assessment of students' drawn concept maps but also provides a detailed understanding of students' proficiency and deficiencies in…

Multiple-choice questions have become ubiquitous in educational measurement because the format allows for efficient and accurate scoring. Nonetheless, there remains continued interest in constructed-response formats. This interest has driven efforts to develop computer-based scoring procedures that can accurately and efficiently score these items.…

In this article, we systematize the factors influencing performance and feasibility of automatic content scoring methods for short text responses. We argue that performance (i.e., how well an automatic system agrees with human judgments) mainly depends on the linguistic variance seen in the responses and that this variance is indirectly influenced…

For predicting and improving the quality of essays, text analytic metrics (surface, syntactic, morphological, and semantic features) can be used to provide formative feedback to the students in higher education. In this study, the goal was to identify a sufficient number of features that exhibit a fair proxy of the scores given by the human raters…