This paper offers readings of three examples from a photo-essay project undertaken in 2022 by a group of Year 7 pupils in Berlin. Many of the photo-essays centred on locations like schools, parks and shops, but also included places of worship, the graves of ancestors and evidence of family ties in other cities. Mirroring the practices of the…

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…

Educationalists have had serious problems in proposing well-grounded ways of teaching critical thinking. Reviews of the field have called for research to develop theory concerning the learning experience associated with critical thinking enhancement, as well as to explore more tailored teaching and evaluation methods. This article suggests an…

This research analyzed the efficacy of ChatGPT as a tool for the correction and provision of feedback on primary school students' short essays written in both the English and Greek languages. The accuracy and qualitative aspects of ChatGPT-generated corrections and feedback were compared to that of educators. For the essays written in English, it…

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…

Research on Automated Essay Scoring has become increasing important because it serves as a method for evaluating students' written responses at scale. Scalable methods for scoring written responses are needed as students migrate to online learning environments resulting in the need to evaluate large numbers of written-response assessments. The…

This study aims to understand how bilingual college students constructed literacy spaces across their lives rather than an in-school/out-of-school dichotomy. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991) spatial triad as a lens to examine the participants' spatial literacy practices, the findings show that some participants repurposed planned spaces into literacy…

There is valuable scholarship on the importance of teaching narratives in the FYC classroom, but none does so through the frame of vulnerability. This paper explores, through an IRB approved case study, how composition teachers can best guide students to write powerful and well-crafted personal narratives to ignite students' own voices, histories,…

We adapted and evaluated the effects of a classroom intervention (extension of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2018.04.006) on undergraduates' sourcing skills. Students (n = 266) received either a teacher-led intervention (trained group) or regular classes (control group) and were assessed before, after, and 6 to 8 weeks after the…

In this article, the author uses speculative essay to take up the metaphor of the blank canvas and critique it as part of a majoritarian narrative in educational research. To do this, the author applies the work of Sylvia Wynter (1992, 2003, 2020) and others on the creation of Knowledge and Man in terms of how canonical educational research…

Objectively scoring constructed-response items on educational assessments has long been a challenge due to the use of human raters. Even well-trained raters using a rubric can inaccurately assess essays. Unfolding models measure rater's scoring accuracy by capturing the discrepancy between criterion and operational ratings by placing essays on an…

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.…

With the generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool's remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating meaningful content, intriguing questions have been raised about its potential as an automated essay scoring (AES) system. One such tool is ChatGPT, which is capable of scoring any written work based on predefined criteria. However,…

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…

The goal of this paper is to find better ways to estimate the internal consistency reliability of scores on tests with a specific type of design that are often encountered in practice: tests with constructed-response items clustered into sections that are not parallel or tau-equivalent, and one of the sections has only one item. To estimate the…