Automated writing evaluation (AWE) has been used increasingly to provide feedback on student writing. Previous research typically focused on its inter-rater reliability with human graders and validation frameworks. The limited body of research has only discussed students' attitudes or perceptions in general. A systematic investigation of the…

Paragraph structure has been identified as consisting of three distinct parts, which are the topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a paragraph ending sentence. Although topic sentences have been widely researched, similar consideration for paragraph endings has been less forthcoming. This discrepancy may be problematic as research suggests…

The literature on using scoring rubrics in writing assessment denotes the significance of rubrics as practical and useful means to assess the quality of writing tasks. This study tries to investigate the agreement among rubrics endorsed and used for assessing the essay writing tasks by the internationally recognized tests of English language…

The simple view of writing suggests that written composition results from oral language, transcription (e.g., spelling/handwriting), and self-regulation skills, coordinated within working memory. The model provides a number of implications for the interpretation of psychoeducational achievement batteries. For instance, it hypothesizes that writing…

Strong writing skills are essential for students from primary through post-secondary education, as there is evidence that writing skills are related to both academic performance and success in college and the workplace. One common method used to assess students' current writing skills, monitor students' progress related to writing skills, and aid…

Emerging bilingual learners' biliteracy abilities are often underestimated when monolingual reading assessments, such as the DIBELS, are used to identify students as having difficulties in learning or to guide literacy instruction. The authors propose a holistic form of biliterate assessment that uses writing as a means to understand what emerging…

Purpose: This study aims to broaches several endemic challenges for academics who support doctoral writing: writers are emotionally protective of their own writing; writing a thesis in English as a second language is a challenging, complex task; and advising across cultures is delicate. Giving constructive feedback kindly, but with the rigour…

Researchers studying curriculum-based measurement of written expression have used a variety of writing prompt types and durations when establishing criterion validity of these tools. The purpose of this study was to determine through meta-analytic procedures whether any prompt type or duration was superior to others in terms of criterion validity.…

Anonymity has been suggested as a way to mitigate the possible negative effects of interpersonal variables that may arise during the peer review process. However, since anonymity is not always possible, it is important to consider how the level of familiarity between peers may influence the peer review process. This study therefore explores the…

This study reports on student writing outcomes from a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between applied linguists (the authors) and an organizational behavior (OB) professor. We used an ethnographic language-focused approach to make explicit the linguistic features of the case analysis genre at an American university in the Middle East. We…

This article outlines a workshop orienting sociology graduate students to overcoming challenges in publishing. Although graduate students are increasingly told to publish, little guidance exists on how to best prepare them for this venture; mentorship scholarship typically assumes the professor--student relationship is the best or most appropriate…

An automated essay scoring (AES) program is a software system that uses techniques from corpus and computational linguistics and machine learning to grade essays. In this study, we aimed to describe and evaluate particular language features of Coh-Metrix for a novel AES program that would score junior and senior high school students' essays from…

Despite the breadth of integrated writing assessment research, few studies have examined student perceptions of classroom-based integrated writing tasks or the instructional value of analytic rubrics. Adopting a case study methodology, this exploratory research investigated L2 learners' conceptualizations of integrated writing assessment and their…

If assessment is about improving learning and facilitating better teaching through research and helping students learn what higher education purports to value, then the often-invisible institutional barriers that do not always embrace the ways in which classroom assessment can teach an institution about student learning within individual…

This study explores using transfer learning in machine learning for natural language processing (NLP) to create generic automated essay scoring (AES) models, providing instant online scoring for statewide writing assessments in K-12 education. The goal is to develop an instant online scorer that is generalizable to any prompt, addressing the…