We describe a study aimed at measuring the use of factual information in test-taker essays and assessing its effectiveness for predicting essay scores. We found medium correlations with the proposed measures, that remained significant after the effect of essay length was factored out. The correlations did not differ substantionally between a simple, relatively robust measure vs a more sophistic...

E-rater® has been used by the Educational Testing Service for automated essay scoring since 1999. This paper describes a new version of e-rater (V.2) that is different from other automated essay scoring systems in several important respects. The main innovations of e-rater V.2 are a small, intuitive, and meaningful set of features used for scoring; a single scoring model and standards can be us...

E-rater® has been used by the Educational Testing Service for automated essay scoring since 1999. This paper describes a new version of e-rater (V.2) that is different from other automated essay scoring systems in several important respects. The main innovations of e-rater V.2 are a small, intuitive, and meaningful set of features used for scoring; a single scoring model and standards can be us...

In this paper, we address the problem of quantifying the overall extent to which a testtaker’s essay deals with the topic it is assigned (prompt). We experiment with a number of models for word topicality, and a number of approaches for aggregating word-level indices into text-level ones. All models are evaluated for their ability to predict the holistic quality of essays. We show that the best...

The world of academic publishing has changed significantly. In this short essay, I attempt to offer a few observations as the editor of an international journal, suggesting that we may need to have a more in-depth theoretical engagement with current publishing practices. This includes the diminishing role of editors, the nature of authorship and the related review process, and the ways in which...

For many academic physician-scientists, the yearly Tri-Societies meeting of the ASCI, AAP, and AFCR during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s was an annual rite of spring and the focal point of the academic year. In this brief essay, I set down some miscellaneous recollections of these meetings and some thoughts about why they were of such central importance in the careers of those of my generation.

This study intended to investigate the interplay of critical thinking explicit instruction, academic writing performance, critical thinking ability, and critical thinking dispositions of Iranian students. To this end, 140 students of Jahrom University of Medical Sciences (73 males and 67 females) were selected. They were divided into the experimental and control groups. Both groups received ins...