Giving Compass' Take:

• RAND piloted eRevise in 32 classrooms to gain educator perspectives on what they want from their automated writing evaluation systems. 

• How can funding online education research equip educators with the best tools? 

• Read how to make online learning effective in education for the long term. 

Revising in response to formative feedback is a cornerstone of effective writing instruction. Providing substantive comments on stacks of student essays, however, is highly time-consuming for busy teachers. As a result, teachers can be reluctant to assign many essays that require students to produce multiple drafts or provide extensive comments on early drafts of students' writing.

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems offer a promising approach to relieving the burden of giving formative feedback to students on their writing. These systems employ natural language processing technologies to provide automated feedback messages to students to guide their revisions.

Despite the potential of AWE systems to support writing instruction, they have not been widely adopted by schools or teachers. Computer scientists and literacy researchers have been the main architects of AWE systems. Teachers, however, are the experts on managing the daily tasks of instruction, and their voices have largely been left out of the development of AWE systems. What do teachers want to see in AWE systems so that such technology can be integrated in their teaching, rather than “one more thing” added to their classroom schedules?

We asked teachers this question in our research developing an AWE system called eRevise. eRevise provides automated feedback to improve fifth and sixth grade students' use of text evidence in their argument writing essays.

We piloted eRevise in 32 classrooms serving students from diverse economic backgrounds. Our goal was to understand teachers' perspectives on the system, in addition to studying how students understood and responded to the feedback messages in their revision. Here is what we learned from teachers about the seven ways AWE systems, such has eRevise, could best support their teaching:

  • Provide Timely Feedback
  • Allow an Active Role for Teachers
  • Align with State and District Standards
  • Be Compatible with Multiple Source Texts
  • Point Students to the Parts of Their Essays That Need Revision
  • Mark Success
  • Provide Dashboard to Monitor Student Progress

Read the full article about automated writing evaluation by Lindsay Clare Matsumura at RAND.