The purpose of the current dissertation is to map the relationships between first language (L1), writing quality, and syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) in second language (L2) writing. CALF are characteristics of language production that have been of significant interest in L2 writing research for the past few…

Writing support programs for students in writing-intensive, disciplinary courses are well established and take many forms, including communication centers, web-based skill development programs, and embedded writing consultants. This paper assesses the effectiveness of a program that embeds a writing grader, who assesses only the grammar of…

Praising is considered to have a positive effect on learners' motivations. Yet, what to praise and how to praise is an issue of controversy. The present study looks at the effect of praising ESL learners' writing efforts in English as opposed to evaluating their writing abilities in order to test Dweck (2007) theory of praising intelligence or…

Background: Experiential educators face difficulties assessing participants and programs because there are so many measurement tools to choose from, many measures have validity issues such as those based on self-reported data, objective tests may not adequately measure social or psychological outcomes, and tests in content disciplines often assess…

Automated scoring based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been successfully used to score essays and constrained short answer responses. Scoring tests that capture open-ended, short answer responses poses some challenges for machine learning approaches. We used LSA techniques to score short answer responses to the Consequences Test, a measure…

To capitalize on professional expertise in educational assessment, it is desirable to develop and test methods of rater-mediated assessment that enable classroom teachers to make reliable and informative judgments. Accordingly, this article investigates the reliability of a two-stage method used by classroom teachers to assess primary school…

The literature on calibration suggests that students consider a multitude of factors when they self-evaluate task performance. Nevertheless, few studies have focused on calibration within a complex task environment, such as when students are asked to compose written responses based on multiple texts. In this study, we examined the criteria that…

Twenty-first-century learners are "plugged in," fluent with technology, and motivated by social media. Why not embrace their passion and use social media to engage them in authentic and meaningful English-language learning that allows them to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening in a familiar and motivating context? Author…

Recently, comparative judgement has been introduced as an alternative method for scoring essays. Although this method is promising in terms of obtaining reliable scores, empirical evidence concerning its validity is lacking. The current study examines implications resulting from two critical assumptions underpinning the use of comparative…

In this study, the researchers analyzed writing produced by newcomer immigrant and refugee students in a literacy workshop facilitated by visiting college tutors. Fourteen adolescent students, primarily from Central America, worked over a semester with a college partner to read mentor texts about youth immigration experiences, write their own…

This longitudinal study (2002-2014) investigates the stability of rating characteristics of a large group of raters over time in the context of the writing paper of a national high-stakes examination. The study uses one measure of rater severity and two measures of rater consistency. The results suggest that the rating characteristics of…

This paper reports on a three-year action research project action investigating the relationship between assessment as a social structure and the agency of students within a preparatory course for postgraduate international students at a UK Russell Group University. Action research into academic writing assessment within this highly constrained…

With a considerable emphasis on the role of feedback in L2 writing, the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) has been investigated extensively over the past 25 years. Conflicting findings have been reported regarding the efficacy of WCF in developing learners' written accuracy. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of research on…

Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) provides automatic writing feedback and scoring to support student writing and revising. The purpose of the present study was to analyze a statewide implementation of an AWE software (n = 114,582) in grades 4-11. The goals of the study were to evaluate: (1) to what extent AWE features were used; (2) if equity and…

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…