This reflective essay documents the adaptation of an active-learning strategy in response to the spring 2020 global pandemic. We detail how we adapted it from its original form as an intentionally nondigital, face-to-face, team-based activity into a new, fully digital format. We articulate the active-learning methods driving the original design as…

When students present writing tasks that require higher order thinking skills to work, one of the most important problems is scoring these writing tasks objectively. The fact that raters give scores below or above their performance based on several environmental factors affects the consistency of the measurements. Inconsistencies in scoring…

There are several student performances assessed in Intensive English Programs (IEPs) worldwide in each academic year. These student performances are mostly graded by human raters with a certain degree of error. However, the accuracy of these performance assessments is of utmost importance because they feed data into some high stakes decisions…

It is undeniable that attempts to develop automated feedback systems that support and enhance language learning and assessment have increased in the last few years. The growing demand for using technology in the classroom and the promotions provided by automated- written-feedback program developers and designers, drive many educational…

Objective: While academic writing is considered a core competency in academia, academic writing anxiety is ubiquitous in doctoral student cohorts. Doctoral writing groups provide a space for participants to learn from each other's writing through the peer feedback process. In this conceptual review, we explore the dialogic nature of the peer…

In a randomized trial that collects text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require that each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by human raters. An impact analysis can then be conducted to compare treatment and control groups, using the hand-coded scores as a measured outcome. This…

Evaluation of student written work during summative assessments is an important and critical task for instructors at all educational levels. Nevertheless, few research studies exist that provide insights into how different instructors approach this task. Chemistry faculty (FIs) and graduate student instructors (GSIs) regularly engage in the…

Articulating ideas in writing based on English conventions may be one of the biggest challenges for English as a foreign language students, which makes corrective feedback (CF) an indispensable part in writing practice. In terms of providing CF, researchers have claimed that indirect CF has a number of advantages for the improvement of students'…

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…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems have been increasingly incorporated in L2 writing instruction. However, how the instructional use of AWE influences learners' writing has remained inconclusive partly due to variations in heterogeneous learners. Underpinned by a sociocultural theory, this classroom-based study was to understand how…

It is widely believed that human rating performance is influenced by an array of different factors. Among these, rater-related variables such as experience, language background, perceptions, and attitudes have been mentioned. One of the important rater-related factors is the way the raters interact with the rating scales. In particular, how raters…

In this article, we aim to explore the differences in the received peer feedback among successful, less successful, and unsuccessful students in higher education. This exploratory study was conducted in online settings and in the context of argumentative essay writing. In total, 135 undergraduate students participated in an online module and they…