Essay questions designed to measure writing ability, along with open-ended questions requiring short answers, are highly-valued components of effective assessment programs, but the expense and logistics of scoring them reliably often present a barrier to their use. Extensive research and development efforts at Educational Testing Service (ETS) over the past several years (see http://www.ets.org...

Educators are interested in essay evaluation systems that include feedback about writing features that can facilitate the essay revision process. For instance, if the thesis statement of a student’s essay could be automatically identified, the student could then use this information to reflect on the thesis statement with regard to its quality, and its relationship to other discourse elements i...

The present case study sought to investigate the application of dynamic assessment to an EFL writing context. It primarily aimed to understand the effectiveness of an interactionist dynamic assessment procedure through a web-based application in enhancing argumentative essay writing skill at the university level. The three participants of the study received mediational interactions in five cons...

This article describes how a group of Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners were guided through the practice of writing their first academic essays in English. The method applied the principle of scaffolding to the essay writing process by providing flexible support for the learners during the writ- ing their first essays. Scaffolding included a number of aspects, each of which is explained i...

A " hot topic " in educational measurement is the area of computerized essay test evaluation. As essays have been incorporated into many of the standardized testing programs, and computerized testing is being implemented in more and more instances, there are many instances of where computers have evaluated the essay portion of standardized tests. In an environment where humans typically evaluat...

Revising is an essential writing process yet automated writing evaluation systems tend to give feedback on discrete essay drafts rather than changes across drafts. We explore the feasibility of automated revision detection and its potential to guide feedback. Relationships between revising behaviors and linguistic features of students’ essays are discussed.

The researchers in this study aimed to demonstrate how impossible it could be for a language teacher to take fixed, systematic routes of action in recent Action Research designs.  This was instantiated in an L2 (here, English) 'essay writing' course among some Persian speaker university students majoring in Hygiene Sciences (Family and Environment). Evidences regarding individualistic progress ...