The majority of high-stakes tests from elementary school through postsecondary education include the timed impromptu essay as a measure of writing performance. For adolescents with writing disorders, this type of evaluation often presents a significant barrier. The purpose of the current study was twofold. First, we investigated the influence of handwritten, typed, and typed/edited formats of a...

In a response to the perceived lack of study and academic skills evident among HE students, a great deal of time and effort is put in across the country to create online resources for students. However, it is common for staff to express a concern that students do not access these resources, or that the resources produce only a minimal improvement in performance. This paper examines the results ...

Many approaches have been proposed for providing feedback in academic writing, however, few of them are visually based. We describe a novel visualisation method for providing feedback to support formative essay assessment. The visualisation method makes use of text mining techniques to provide insight on the semantics of the topics in an essay. We propose that visualisation can be used to mitig...

No published studies have sufficiently focused on essay topic writability from the perspective of college writers of the new millennium including native English speakers and ESL speakers. In this study, 500 college writers in Metro Toronto in Canada were interviewed to uncover if they found some essay topics easier than other topics. The results indicate that over 90% of them did. The interview...

I would like to thank Rani Spiegler for the many discussions we had on Behavioral Economics during the last few years. I could not imagine writing this essay without the benefit of his comments, insights, ideas and criticism.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between argumentation structures and (a) argument content, and (b) the holistic quality of an argumentative essay. Our results suggest that structure-based approaches hold promise for automated evaluation of argumentative writing.

In the late nineteenth century, Alexander Bain, professor of rhetoric, logic, and mental philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, charged that what his profession knew about effective writing assignments was only at the level of the "infant school." After detailing many of the problems and inequities inherent in essay assignments, Bain concluded that "there are very strong objections to Essay ...

Automated Essay Scoring 2 Introduction This chapter documents the advent and rise of automated essay scoring (AES) as a means of both assessment and instruction. The first section discusses what AES is, how it works, and who the major purveyors of the technology are. The second section describes outgrowths of the technology as it applies to ongoing projects in measurement and education. In 1973...

The relationship between collaboration processes, task strategies and the use of the tools and resources that the computer environment offers, may be crucial for the effects of computer supported collaborative learning. We are interested to find out how, within a computer environment, students collaborate, how they use the different tools we offer and how this influences the quality of the fina...