in assessing foreign language writing, holistic and analytic scoring can be used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. this study aimed to investigate the possible significant effect of analyt- ic and holistic assessments on improving writing skill among iranian efl learners. for this purpose, two groups of intermediate efl learners, after being homogenized, were divided in...

In assessing foreign language writing, holistic and analytic scoring can be used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. This study aimed to investigate the possible significant effect of analyt- ic and holistic assessments on improving writing skill among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, two groups of intermediate EFL learners, after being homogenized, were divided in...

The main purpose of the study was to investigate the distinctness and reliability of analytic (or multitrait) rating dimensions and their relationships to holistic scores and e-rater essay feature variables in the context of the TOEFL computer-based test (CBT) writing assessment. Data analyzed in the study were analytic and holistic essay scores provided by human raters and essay feature variab...

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...

Automatic essay scoring is nowadays successfully used even in high-stakes tests, but this is mainly limited to holistic scoring of learner essays. We present a new dataset of essays written by highly proficient German native speakers that is scored using a fine-grained rubric with the goal to provide detailed feedback. Our experiments with two state-of-the-art scoring systems (a neural and a SV...

Creativity assessment commonly uses open-ended divergent thinking tasks. The typical methods for scoring these tasks (uniqueness scoring and subjective ratings) are time-intensive, however, so it is impractical for researchers to include divergent thinking as an ancillary construct. The present research evaluated snapshot scoring of divergent thinking tasks, in which the set of responses receiv...

The current study examined relationships between expert human judgments of text quality and grammar and mechanical errors in student writing. A corpus of essays (N = 100) written by high school students in the W-Pal system was collected, coded for grammar and mechanical errors, and scored by expert human raters. Results revealed weak relations between grammar errors and holistic essay scores an...

Japanese students’ lack of English writing skills has been a long-standing problem. It not only originates from grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, but also the availability fewer opportunities to write essays in English. Further, current standards for evaluating written by beginner-level learners are established sufficiently, resulting heavy grading burden on teachers. This study establishes...

Accuracy of content have not been fully utilized in the previous studies on automated speaking assessment. Compared to writing tests, responses in speaking tests are noisy (due to recognition errors), full of incomplete sentences, and short. To handle these challenges for doing content-scoring in speaking tests, we propose two new methods based on information extraction (IE) and machine learnin...