It is common that students peer-review other students’ writing, and these reviews are useful information to instructors, both on the particulars of the essay being reviewed, the feedback provided and the overall progress of the class. This paper describes a novel approach to summarising feedback in academic essay writing. We present a summarisation method for identifying and extracting represen...

Research on automated essay scoring (AES) indicates that computer-generated essay ratings are comparable to human ratings. However, despite investigations into the accuracy and reliability of AES scores, less attention has been paid to the feedback delivered to the students. This paper presents a method developers can use to quickly evaluate the usability of an automated feedback system prior t...

The Writing Pal is an intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy training. A large part of its artificial intelligence resides in the natural language processing algorithms to assess essay quality and guide feedback to students. Because writing is often highly nuanced and subjective, the development of these algorithms must consider a broad array of linguistic, rhetorical, and c...

Essays are frequently used as a medium for teaching and evaluating argumentation skills. Recently, there has been interest in diagrammatic outlining as a replacement to the written outline that often precedes essay writing. This paper presents a preliminary approach for automatically identifying diagram ontology elements in essays, and demonstrates its positive correlation with expert scores of...

Idea generation is an important component of most major theories of writing. However, few studies have linked idea generation in writing samples to assessments of writing quality or examined links between linguistic features in a text and idea generation. This study uses human ratings of idea generation, such as idea fluency, idea flexibility, idea originality, and idea elaboration, to analyze ...

The complexity of self-regulatory strategies has been challenging to educational researchers who seek to find proper interventions that benefit students and teachers. This study has employed the Self-Regulatory Strategy Development (SRSD) model of instruction to help students monitor, evaluate and revise their writing. SRSD would be beneficial for adult students with learning disabilities in th...

This paper provides an overview of e-rater®, a state-of-the-art automated essay scoring system developed at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). E-rater is used as part of the operational scoring of two high-stakes graduate admissions programs: the GRE® General Test and the TOEFL iBT® assessments. E-rater is also used to provide score reporting and diagnostic feedback in Criterion SM , ETS’s ...

This article reviews recent studies in which human judgements of essay quality are assessed using Coh-Metrix, an automated text analysis tool. The goal of these studies is to better understand the relationship between linguistic features of essays and human judgements of writing quality. Coh-Metrix reports on a wide range of linguistic features, affording analyses of writing at various levels o...

This study examined the construct validity of the e-rater automated essay scoring engine as an alternative to human scoring in the context of TOEFL essay writing. Analyses were based on a sample of students who repeated the TOEFL within a short time period. Two e-rater scores were investigated in this study, the first based on optimally predicting the human essay score and the second based on e...