Current approaches used in educational research and practice to evaluate the quality of written arguments often rely on structural analysis. In such assessments, credit is awarded for the presence of structural elements of an argument, such as claims, evidence, and rebuttals. In this article, we discuss limitations of such approaches, including…

Depending on the nature of comments made during peer review of academic writing, students may be able to evaluate and revise their performance. Therefore, it is essential to explore how the content of comments affects student writing. Since peer review is a process of interaction, it is critical to understand how comments affect student academic…

This paper explores the growing complexity of detecting and differentiating generative AI from other AI interventions. Initially prompted by noticing how tools like Grammarly were being flagged by AI detection software, it examines how these popular tools such as Grammarly, EditPad, Writefull, and AI models such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing…

Recent investigations in automated essay scoring research imply that hybrid models, which combine feature engineering and the powerful tools of deep neural networks (DNNs), reach state-of-the-art performance. However, most of these findings are from holistic scoring tasks. In the present study, we use a total of four prompts from two different…

This paper introduces REFLECTSUMM, a novel summarization dataset specifically designed for summarizing students' reflective writing. The goal of REFLECTSUMM is to facilitate developing and evaluating novel summarization techniques tailored to real-world scenarios with little training data, with potential implications in the opinion summarization…

In this article, I provide a chronological narrative to my ungrading choices in composition classes as a neurodiverse single mother from a working-class background. I discuss my positionality as a White person committed to justice and my experiences as an "assessment killjoy" (West-Puckett et al.) during the ethical turn in writing…

Assessing students' writing performance is essential to adequately monitor and promote individual writing development, but it is also a challenge. The present research investigates a benchmark rating procedure for assessing texts written by upper-elementary students. In two studies we examined whether a benchmark rating procedure (1) leads to…

Students are expected to interpret the complexities and nuances of literary texts yet might struggle with interpreting texts in ways that are valued in literary studies. Examining students' language choices can support instructors and students with developing concrete, explicit understandings of the ways language creates meanings in discourse.…

Background: A common approach to assessing students' integrated understanding of multiple documents is to analyse their post-reading written reports. This study investigated to what extent writing self-efficacy directly and indirectly (via integrative processing) contributed to multiple-document comprehension as assessed with an integrative…

Preschool teachers' literacy-related beliefs and literacy knowledge relate to their educational practices and preschoolers' literacy skills. In this light, we explored how preschool teachers' beliefs regarding early literacy and its promotion predict their knowledge, reflected in how they evaluate three young children's writing products and their…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) provides an instant and cost-effective alternative to human feedback in assessing student writing, and therefore is widely used as a pedagogical supportive tool in writing instruction. However, studies on how students perceive the usage of AWE as a surrogate writing tutor in out-of-class autonomous learning are…

As generative AI (GenAI) continues to permeate academia, distinguishing between student-authored essays and those by Large Language Models (LLMs) becomes crucial for maintaining academic integrity. This study conducted a survey on the ethical awareness of using generative AI tools among a group of STEM students (n=156). Also, we empirically…

In response to (1) studies finding that essay feedback generated by ChatGPT might be useful for student writers and (2) studies observing ChatGPT's tendency to adhere to narrow genre definitions when producing writing, our study seeks to examine whether ChatGPT can provide useful feedback in a first-year writing learning environment that targets a…

Evaluating the quality of university exam papers is crucial for universities seeking institutional and program accreditation. Currently, exam papers are assessed manually, a process that can be tedious, lengthy, and in some cases, inconsistent. This is often due to the focus on assessing only the formal specifications of exam papers. This study…

Reflective Learning Journals are used to engage students in the learning process. To motivate students to complete the Reflective Learning Journal it is common practice to allocate marks and it is in this area that problems arise. To address the problems rubrics have been used however, most rubrics are based on assigning marks to very…