This study compared the results from nine automated essay scoring engines on eight essay scoring prompts drawn from six states that annually administer high-stakes writing assessments. Student essays from each state were randomly divided into three sets: a training set (used for modeling the essay prompt responses and consisting of text and ratings from two human raters along with a final or re...

Advanced writing skills are an important aspect of academic performance as well as of subsequent work-related performance. However, American students rarely attain advanced scores on assessments of writing skills (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2002). In order to achieve higher levels of writing performance, the working memory demands of writing processes should be reduced so that...

A quasi-experimental study compared the effects of feedback condition on eighth-grade students’ writing motivation and writing achievement. Four classes of eighth-graders were assigned to a combined feedback condition in which they received feedback on their writing from their teacher and from an automated essay evaluation (AEE) system called PEGWriting®. Four other eighth-grade classes were as...

This month, the Postgraduate Medical Journal celebrates its 90th anniversary. By a nice coincidence, this happens to be the 90th article I have contributed to its pages, mainly in the form of reflective essays in this column. I feel privileged to be associated with the journal, and to be following in the footsteps of Sir William Osler, who helped to found the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine...

This study investigates the importance of human evaluations of coherence in predicting human judgments of holistic essay quality. Of secondary interest is the potential for computational indices of cohesion and coherence to model human judgments of coherence. The results indicate that human judgments of coherence are the most predictive features of holistic essay scores and that computational i...