Idea Works: Using Automated Grading for Collaborative Learning

It’s possible to use sophisticated Artificial Intelligence to automatically grade and give feedback on student writing, writes Colin Monaghan of Idea Works.

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Most college students don’t expect to receive feedback from their instructor at 2am. But automated essay grading systems now being used in some college classes allow instructors to “time-shift” their evaluation, giving students detailed, personal advice while they are working on the assignment.

With a constant stream of feedback, students have the opportunity to submit multiple revisions in one sitting, helping them dig deeper into the material while improving their scores.

Programs like SAGrader™, pioneered by a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, blur the line between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration by allowing instructors to create and save assignment-specific grading standards in the program. This rubric is expressed in SAGrader as a semantic network, or concept map.

Then, utilizing a blend of linguistic, statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, SAGrader analyzes student submissions and presents the instructor’s rubric back to the student in the form of feedback and a score. It can be used with a wide variety of writing assignments, from short-answer questions to multiple-page essays.

As universities continue to encourage writing across disciplines, programs like SAGrader may be one way to provide students with plenty of writing practice without creating an unrealistic grading load for instructors or teaching assistants.

Idea Works is a software development company based in Columbia, MO that specializes in extracting meaning from textual data. Their flagship education product, SAGrader, is designed to enhance student learning by providing real-time feedback on their writing.

Colin Monaghan, a designer based in Seattle, WA, has been helping instructors incorporate more writing and feedback into their classes for the last four years.

Comments

Idea Works: Using Automated Grading for Collaborative Learning | International Education News | Renascence School International | Panama City | private preschool, elementary school, middle school

October 6, 2011 at 6:53 am

[...] giving students detailed, personal advice while they are working on the assignment.”(more) Comments (0) Go to main news [...]

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Automated Term Paper Grading | Contretemps

October 6, 2011 at 8:47 am

[...] Idea Works: Using Automated Grading for Collaborative Learning | Education News. [...]

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pbinCA

October 7, 2011 at 6:39 am

Does SAGrader understand the meaning of the thoughts expressed in the essay? If so, this would be a great scientific breakthrough to be heralded the world over. If not, the feedback will be mechanistic, shallow and uninformed. Writing is about sharing thoughts. The real-time aspect is valuable. Have you tested SAGrader against a set of human readers? How does it correlate?

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October 11, 2011 at 3:01 pm

[...] To read more, click HERE [...]

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Should We Be Worried About Robo Graders? - Online College Courses

May 10, 2012 at 2:09 pm

[...] was developed by a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. In the article, Idea Works: Using Automated Grading for Collaborative Learning, it is described as a program that will “blur the line between synchronous and asynchronous [...]

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