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| ONGOING PROJECTThis FIPSE funded project will create national norms for documents found commonly in electronic portfolios, and then make available, for a period of five years, automated software that could grade the documents via the world wide web. Documents that would be included in the norming procedure would be drawn from six writing genre: reports of empirical research, technical reports, critiques, reflection, narratives, and works of fiction. This application is based on previous research with shorter (i.e., less than 500 words) essays in which computers have surpassed both the reliability and validity of human raters. The approach uses the evaluation of human raters as the ultimate criterion, and regression models of writing are based on large numbers of essays and raters. In order to build the statistical models to evaluate the writing, institutions across the country, representing a wide range of Carnegie classifications, have agreed to each provide 400-750 documents that are reflective of their current electronic portfolios. Six raters will evaluate each document and provide both holistic and trait ratings. Vantage Technologies, Inc. has agreed to provide their Intellimetric™ parser for both model building and actual implementation of the project. Post-secondary institutions that are moving towards electronic portfolios could benefit from having access to the comparative information. Moreover, establishing norms would allow a college to examine writing development of students over time. Finally, the software could be used in a formative manner, allowing students to preview their writing evaluations in order to improve writing or make better document selections. Currently, we are working with the vendor, Vantage Learning, to revalidate work that has gone on with other automated essay scoring programs.
Project Head: Mark D. Shermis, Director of
IUPUI Testing Center Vantage Technologies, Inc: http://www.intellimetric.com Syracuse University: http://www.syr.edu Washington State University: http://www.wsu.edu Butler University: http://www.butler.edu California State University Monterey Bay: http://www.monterey.edu IUPUI: http://www.iupui.edu Western Kentucky University: http://www.wku.edu
Western Michigan University: http://www.wmich.edu
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