Tracking Student Learning in a State-Wide Implementation of Automated Writing Scoring

Student essays provide rich information about the students’ knowledge gain and the writing skills acquired. However, hand-scoring is time consuming and does not lend well to large-scale data analyses. Automated scoring of the writing allows monitoring and feedback for individual students as well as tracking changes in performance at district and state levels. We describe an operational implementation of a state-wide formative writing assessment and methods to analyze essays to track student gains as a result of feedback from the assessment. Such approaches become more critical with greater availability of MOOCs and other online learning systems that incorporate online writing.