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Developing and Scoring an Innovative Computerized Writing Assessment
Author(s) -
Davey Tim,
Godwin Janet,
Mittelholtz David
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal of educational measurement
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.917
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1745-3984
pISSN - 0022-0655
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-3984.1997.tb00505.x
Subject(s) - computer science , suspect , test (biology) , cursor (databases) , natural language processing , weighting , rewriting , grammar , information retrieval , artificial intelligence , psychology , statistics , linguistics , mathematics , programming language , medicine , paleontology , philosophy , criminology , radiology , biology
We describe the development and administration of a recently introduced computer‐based test of writing skills. This test asks the examinee to edit a writing passage presented on a computer screen. To do this, the examinee moves a cursor to a suspect section of the passage and chooses from a list of alternative ways o f rewriting that section. Any or all parts o f the passage can be changed, as often as the examinee likes. An able examinee identifies and fixes errors in grammar, organization, and style, whereas a less able examinee may leave errors untouched, replace an error with another error, or even introduce errors where none existed previously. All these response alternatives contrive to present both obvious and subtle scoring difficulties. These difficulties were attacked through the combined use of option weighting and the sequential probability ratio test, the result o f which is to classify examinees into several discrete ability groups. Item calibration was enabled by augmenting sparse pretest samples through data meiosis, in which response vectors were randomly recombined to produce offspring that retained much of the character of their parents. These procedures are described, and operational examples are offered.