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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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This content will become publicly available on June 9, 2026
Factors influencing students' perceptions of automated feedback and their impact on revision.
Automated feedback can provide students with timely information about their writing, but students' willingness to engage meaningfully with the feedback to revise their writing may be influenced by their perceptions of its usefulness. We explored the factors that may have influenced 339, 8th-grade students’ perceptions of receiving automated feedback on their writing and whether their perceptions impacted their revisions and writing improvement. Using HLM and logistic regression analyses, we found that: 1) students with more positive perceptions of the automated feedback made revisions that resulted in significant improvements in their writing, and 2) students who received feedback indicating they included more important ideas in their essays had significantly higher perceptions of the usefulness of the feedback, but were significantly less likely to engage in substantive revisions. Implications and the importance of helping students evaluate and reflect on the feedback to make substantive revisions, no matter their initial feedback, are discussed
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- Award ID(s):
- 2010483
- PAR ID:
- 10613998
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the International Society of the Learning Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings
- ISSN:
- 1814-9316
- ISBN:
- 979-8-9906980-3-1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Helsinki, Finland
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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