Does Automated Feedback Help Students Learn to Write?

We examined whether an automated essay feedback system could improve the writing performance of college students. Students in a freshmen composition course received no feedback or varying amounts of formative feedback on their first drafts of three practice essays (none, intermittent, or continuous). The students wrote a first and then a revised final draft of an essay in a writing lab held once per week. After a retention interval of 2 weeks, a test essay was written without the use of feedback to assess transfer of learning. Holistic scores showed no reliable gains, but the transfer test showed that students learned to reduce errors of mechanics, usage, grammar, and style. The benefit was found for continuous but not intermittent feedback.

[1]  V. Shute.  Focus on Formative Feedback , 2007 .

[2]  Chen-Lin C. Kulik,et al.  The Instructional Effect of Feedback in Test-Like Events , 1991 .

[3]  Hayes.  identifying the organization of wi iiing processes , 1980 .

[4]  Laura G. Dorow,et al.  Instructor Feedback for College Writing Assignments in Introductory Classes , 1998 .

[5]  J. Hayes.  A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. , 1996 .

[6]  Sharlene A. Kiuhara,et al.  Teaching writing to high school students: A national survey , 2009 .

[7]  E. B. Page.  Project Essay Grade: PEG. , 2003 .

[8]  R. Schmidt,et al.  New Conceptualizations of Practice: Common Principles in Three Paradigms Suggest New Concepts for Training , 1992 .

[9]  B. Huot,et al.  The Literature of Direct Writing Assessment: Major Concerns and Prevailing Trends , 1990 .

[10]  Patrick F. Reidy.  An Introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis , 2009 .

[11]  Jill Burstein,et al.  The E-rater® scoring engine: Automated essay scoring with natural language processing. , 2003 .

[12]  Christian D. Schunn,et al.  Validity and reliability of scaffolded peer assessment of writing from instructor and student perspectives , 2006 .

[13]  Larry Ambrose,et al.  The power of feedback. , 2002, Healthcare executive.

[14]  N. Elliot.  On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America , 2005 .

[15]  Paul B. Diederich,et al.  Measuring Growth in English , 1974 .

[16]  Magdalena Wolska,et al.  Toward evaluation of writing style: finding overly repetitive word use in student essays , 2003 .

[17]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language , 2004, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[18]  Robert C. Calfee,et al.  Best Practices in Writing Assessment , 2007 .

[19]  Peter W. Foltz,et al.  Automatically deriving readers’ knowledge structures from texts , 1999, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[20]  Peter W. Foltz,et al.  The Measurement of Textual Coherence with Latent Semantic Analysis. , 1998 .

[21]  Samuel Totten.  Book Review of The Neglected "R": The Need for a Writing Revolution , 2004 .

[22]  Jill Burstein,et al.  AUTOMATED ESSAY SCORING WITH E‐RATER® V.2.0 , 2004 .

[23]  Mark Warschauer,et al.  Automated writing evaluation: defining the classroom research agenda , 2006 .

[24]  Jill Burstein,et al.  Automated Essay Scoring : A Cross-disciplinary Perspective , 2003 .

[25]  Richard H. Haswell,et al.  Machine Scoring of Student Essays , 2006 .

[26]  T. Landauer.  Automatic Essay Assessment , 2003 .

[27]  Sara E. Quay.  Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More , 2007 .