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1. eRevise+RF: A Writing Evaluation System for Assessing Student Essay Revisions and Providing Formative Feedback

   Liu, Zhexiong; Litman, Diane; Wang, Elaine; Li, Tianwen; Gobat, Mason; Matsumura, Lindsay; Correnti, Richard (April 2025, Association for Computational Linguistics)

   Dziri, Nouha; Ren, Sean; Diao, Shizhe (Ed.)

   The ability to revise essays in response to feedback is important for students’ writing success. An automated writing evaluation (AWE) system that supports students in revising their essays is thus essential. We present eRevise+RF, an enhanced AWE system for assessing student essay revisions (e.g., changes made to an essay to improve its quality in response to essay feedback) and providing revision feedback. We deployed the system with 6 teachers and 406 students across 3 schools in Pennsylvania and Louisiana. The results confirmed its effectiveness in (1) assessing student essays in terms of evidence usage, (2) extracting evidence and reasoning revisions across essays, and (3) determining revision success in responding to feedback. The evaluation also suggested eRevise+RF is a helpful system for young students to improve their argumentative writing skills through revision and formative feedback. 

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2. Reading, receiving, revising: A case study on the relationship between peer review and revision in writing-to-learn

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2024.100808  

   Finkenstaedt-Quinn, Solaire A; Watts, Field M; Shultz, Ginger V (January 2024, Assessing Writing)

   East, Martin; Slomp, David (Ed.)

   Studies examining peer review demonstrate that students can learn from giving feedback to and receiving feedback from their peers, especially when they utilize information gained from the review process to revise. However, much of the research on peer review is situated within the literature regarding how students learn to write. With an increasing use of writing-to-learn in STEM classrooms, it is important to study how students engage in peer review for these types of writing assignments. This study sought to better understand how peer review and revision can support student learning for writing-to-learn specifically, using the lenses of cognitive perspectives of writing and engagement with written corrective feedback. Using a case study approach, we provide a detailed analysis of six students’ written artifacts in response to a writing-to-learn assignment that incorporated peer review and revision implemented in an organic chemistry course. Students demonstrated a range in the types of revisions they made and the extent to which the peer review process informed their revisions. Additionally, students exhibited surface, midlevel, and active engagement with the peer review and revision process. Considering the different engagement levels can inform how we frame peer review to students when using it as an instructional practice. 

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3. Revisions in scientific explanations using automated feedback

   Cang, Xuesong; Gnesdilow, Dana; & Puntambekar, Sadhana (July 2023, Proceedings of the International Conference of Computer-Supported Learning)

   Writing and revising scientific explanations helps students integrate disparate scientific ideas into a cohesive understanding of science. Natural language processing technologies can help assess students’ writing and give corresponding feedback, which supports their writing and revision of their scientific ideas. However, the feedback is not always helpful to students. Our study investigated 241 middle school students’ a) use of feedback, b) how it affected their revisions, and c) how these factors affected students’ writing improvement. We found that students made more content-related revisions when they used feedback. Making content-related revisions also assisted students in improving their writing. But students still found it difficult to make integrated revisions and did not use feedback often. Additional support to assist students to understand and use feedback, especially for students with limited science knowledge, is needed. 

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4. Essay Revision and Corresponding Grade Change as Captured by Text Similarity and Revision Purposes

   Cromp, Sonia; Litman, Diane (June 2021, Workshop for Undergraduates in Educational Data Mining and Learning Engineering)

   Writing and revision are abstract skills that can be challenging to teach to students. Automatic essay revision assistants offer to help in this area because they compare two drafts of a student's essay and analyze the revisions performed. For these assistants to be useful, they need to provide useful information such as whether the revisions are likely to lead to an improvement in the student's grade. It is necessary to better understand the connection between revisions and grade change so that this information could be displayed in an assistant. So, this work explores the relationship between the tf-idf cosine similarity of two essay drafts and resulting essay grade change. Prior work has demonstrated that identifying the revisions between drafts, then labeling each revision with the purpose behind why the revision was performed is useful to predicting grade change. However, this process is expensive because this sort of annotation is time-consuming for humans. Moreover, classifiers achieve lower accuracy than humans when predicting purposes. Using similarity measures instead of or as supplement to revision purposes may correct these issues, as similarity can be computed automatically and without the issue of classification accuracy. As such, the correlations between grade change and the similarity measure are compared to the correlations between grade change and revision purposes with the potential use-case of an automatic writing assistant in mind. Findings suggest tf-idf cosine similarity captures overall essay and overall grade change while revision purposes capture lighter changes that fix errors or cause the essay to read better. 

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5. Examining the role of assignment design and peer review on student responses and revisions to an organic chemistry writing-to-learn assignment

   https://doi.org/10.1039/d4rp00024b  

   Watts, Field M; Finkenstaedt-Quinn, Solaire A; Shultz, Ginger V (June 2024, Chemistry Education Research and Practice)

   Lewis, Scott (Ed.)

   Research on student learning in organic chemistry indicates that students tend to focus on surface level features of molecules with less consideration of implicit properties when engaging in mechanistic reasoning. Writing-to-learn (WTL) is one approach for supporting students’ mechanistic reasoning. A variation of WTL incorporates peer review and revision to provide opportunities for students to interact with and learn from their peers, as well as revisit and reflect on their own knowledge and reasoning. However, research indicates that the rhetorical features included in WTL assignments may influence the language students use in their responses. This study utilizes machine learning to characterize the mechanistic features present in second-semester undergraduate organic chemistry students’ responses to two versions of a WTL assignment with different rhetorical features. Furthermore, we examine the role of peer review on the mechanistic reasoning captured in students’ revised drafts. Our analysis indicates that students include both surface level and implicit features of mechanistic reasoning in their drafts and in the feedback to their peers, with slight differences depending on the rhetorical features present in the assignment. However, students’ revisions appeared to be primarily connected to the peer review processviathe presence of surface features in the drafts students read (as opposed to the feedback received). These findings indicate that further scaffolding focused on how to utilize information gained from the peer review process (i.e., both feedback received and drafts read) and emphasizing implicit properties could help support the utility of WTL for developing students’ mechanistic reasoning in organic chemistry. 

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