How Well Can You Articulate that Idea? Insights from Automated Formative Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Karizaki, Mahsa Sheikhi, Gnesdilow, Dana, Puntambekar, Sadhana, Passonneau, Rebecca J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Karizaki, Mahsa Sheikhi
Gnesdilow, Dana
Puntambekar, Sadhana
Passonneau, Rebecca J.
author_facet Karizaki, Mahsa Sheikhi
Gnesdilow, Dana
Puntambekar, Sadhana
Passonneau, Rebecca J.
contents Automated methods are becoming increasingly integrated into studies of formative feedback on students' science explanation writing. Most of this work, however, addresses students' responses to short answer questions. We investigate automated feedback on students' science explanation essays, where students must articulate multiple ideas. Feedback is based on a rubric that identifies the main ideas students are prompted to include in explanatory essays about the physics of energy and mass, given their experiments with a simulated roller coaster. We have found that students generally improve on revised versions of their essays. Here, however, we focus on two factors that affect the accuracy of the automated feedback. First, we find that the main ideas in the rubric differ with respect to how much freedom they afford in explanations of the idea, thus explanation of a natural law is relatively constrained. Students have more freedom in how they explain complex relations they observe in their roller coasters, such as transfer of different forms of energy. Second, by tracing the automated decision process, we can diagnose when a student's statement lacks sufficient clarity for the automated tool to associate it more strongly with one of the main ideas above all others. This in turn provides an opportunity for teachers and peers to help students reflect on how to state their ideas more clearly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_11682
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Well Can You Articulate that Idea? Insights from Automated Formative Assessment
Karizaki, Mahsa Sheikhi
Gnesdilow, Dana
Puntambekar, Sadhana
Passonneau, Rebecca J.
Computation and Language
Automated methods are becoming increasingly integrated into studies of formative feedback on students' science explanation writing. Most of this work, however, addresses students' responses to short answer questions. We investigate automated feedback on students' science explanation essays, where students must articulate multiple ideas. Feedback is based on a rubric that identifies the main ideas students are prompted to include in explanatory essays about the physics of energy and mass, given their experiments with a simulated roller coaster. We have found that students generally improve on revised versions of their essays. Here, however, we focus on two factors that affect the accuracy of the automated feedback. First, we find that the main ideas in the rubric differ with respect to how much freedom they afford in explanations of the idea, thus explanation of a natural law is relatively constrained. Students have more freedom in how they explain complex relations they observe in their roller coasters, such as transfer of different forms of energy. Second, by tracing the automated decision process, we can diagnose when a student's statement lacks sufficient clarity for the automated tool to associate it more strongly with one of the main ideas above all others. This in turn provides an opportunity for teachers and peers to help students reflect on how to state their ideas more clearly.
title How Well Can You Articulate that Idea? Insights from Automated Formative Assessment
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11682