Platform-enabled research services will control, manage, and measure learner experiences within that platform. In this paper, we consider the need for research services that examine learner experiences "outside" the platform. For example, we describe an effort to conduct an experiment on peer assessment in a college writing course, where…

Increased expectations for writing performance have created a need for formative writing assessments that will help middle school teachers better understand adolescents' grade appropriate writing skills and monitor the progress of students with or at risk for writing disabilities. In this practice piece, we first explain research-based…

Background: Researchers interested in quantitative measures of student "success" in writing cannot control completely for contextual factors which are local and site-based (i.e., in context of a specific instructor's writing classroom at a specific institution). (In)ability to control for curriculum in studies of student writing…

We propose a framework designed to guide the development of automated writing practice and formative evaluation and feedback for young children (K-5 th grade) -- the early Automated Writing Evaluation (early-AWE) Framework. e-AWE is grounded on the fundamental assumption that e-AWE is needed for young developing readers, but must incorporate…

Automated Writing Evaluation systems have been developed to help students improve their writing skills through the automated delivery of both summative and formative feedback. These systems have demonstrated strong potential in a variety of educational contexts; however, they remain limited in their personalization and scope. The purpose of the…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools can facilitate teachers' analysis of and feedback on students' writing. However, increasing evidence indicates that writing instructors experience challenges in implementing AWE tools successfully. For this reason, our development of the Writing Analytics Tool (WAT) has employed a participatory approach…

As intelligent textbooks become more ubiquitous in classrooms and educational settings, the need arises to automatically provide formative feedback to written responses provided by students in response to readings. This study develops models to automatically provide feedback to student summaries written at the end of intelligent textbook sections.…

This paper introduces REFLECTSUMM, a novel summarization dataset specifically designed for summarizing students' reflective writing. The goal of REFLECTSUMM is to facilitate developing and evaluating novel summarization techniques tailored to real-world scenarios with little training data, with potential implications in the opinion summarization…

While automated essay scoring (AES) can reliably grade essays at scale, automated writing evaluation (AWE) additionally provides formative feedback to guide essay revision. However, a neural AES typically does not provide useful feature representations for supporting AWE. This paper presents a method for linking AWE and neural AES, by extracting…

Written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) is a formative assessment approach for screening and progress monitoring. To extend evaluation of WE-CBM, we compared hand-calculated and automated scoring approaches in relation to the number of screening samples needed per student for valid scores, the long-term predictive validity and…

Recent reviews of automated writing evaluation systems indicate lack of uniformity in the purpose, design, and assessment of such systems. Our work lies at the nexus of critical themes arising from these reviews. We describe our work on eRevise, an automated writing evaluation system focused on elementary students' text-based evidence-use. eRevise…

Though argumentative writing is a vital skill across diverse content areas and domains, most U.S. students perform below grade level in writing, and teachers are often unprepared to address this shortfall because their training approaches writing as a subspecialty of reading rather than its own unique discipline. Writing instruction and assessment…

In writing studies research, automated writing evaluation technology is typically examined for a specific, often narrow purpose: to evaluate a particular writing improvement measure, to mine data for changes in writing performance, or to demonstrate the effectiveness of a single technology and accompanying validity arguments. This article adopts a…

Developed by the National Writing Project (NWP), the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) seeks to improve students' argument writing by building teachers' understanding of and skill in teaching source-based argument writing. The program features intensive professional development, skill-based instructional resources, and…

The paper presents the results of a randomized experimental study of a writing curriculum for college developmental writing courses based on strategy instruction with self-regulation integrated with practices common in college composition. Students in a full semester course learned strategies for planning and revising based on rhetorical analysis…