Search for: All records

In principle, educators can use writing to scaffold students’ understanding of increasingly complex science ideas. In practice, formative assessment of students’ science writing is very labor intensive. We present PyrEval+CR, an automated tool for formative assessment of middle school students’ science essays. It identifies each idea in a student’s science essay, and its importance in the curriculum. 

Science writing skills depend on a student’s ability to co-ordinate conceptual understanding of science with the ability to articulate ideas independently, and to distinguish between gradations of importance in ideas. Real-time scaffolding of student writing during and immediately after the writing process could ease the cognitive burden of learning to co-ordinate these skills and enhance student learning of science. This paper presents a design process for automated support of real-time scaffolding of middle school students’ science explanations. We describe our adaptation of an existing tool for automatic content assessment to align more closely with a rubric, and our reliance on data mining of historical examples of middle school science writing. On a reserved test set of semi-synthetic examples of science explanations, the modified tool demonstrated high correlation with the manual rubric. We conclude the tool can support a wide range of design options for customized student feedback in real time.