Semi-Automatic Evaluation Features in Computer-assisted Essay Assessment

The role of assessment and evaluation has recently changed in a way which will have fundamental consequences in applying information and communication technologies (ICTs) to analyzing learning outcomes. Rather than helping the teacher only to get her students' final grades from an entirely automated assessment system, the idea is also to support the student to reflect her learning process as early as possible and point out the strong and weak aspects of it. This paradigmatic shift from a teacher-centered assessment towards learner-centric process evaluation offers interesting challenges to educational technologists, especially in the area of essay evaluation. We present a system that evaluates the content of essays based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). The system applies LSA to compare the conceptual similarity between the essays and selected text passages from the course material covering the essay assignment-specific subject matter. In addition to grade, we use LSA to provide writer with more detailed feedback about the covered points in the essay as an introduction to the semi-automatic essay grading.