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It highlights gaps in students’ writing proficiency and how disparities in writing achievement contribute to broader societal inequities. 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The notes link writing proficiency to workplace readiness and job advantages.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What makes writing evaluation difficult even for trained raters?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Different raters focus on different dimensions such as mechanics, grammar, ideas, and effectiveness of expression. Consistent evaluation requires careful rubrics, examples, practice, and attention to multiple text dimensions.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How can automated writing evaluation tools support writing instruction?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The notes describe natural language processing approaches that provide automated feedback quickly and accurately across many features. 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Today’s knowledge economy places a premium upon collaboration and written communication, which means that the skilled writer enters the job market at a significant advantage (Aschliman, 2016; Brandt, 2005) . And yet students typically enter the job market with weak writing skills. Only 27% of 12th-grade students demonstrated proficiency in writing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (The Nation’s Report Card, 2022) . Similarly, according to one recent study, only 27% of employers classified recent college graduates as “wellprepared” for written communication in the workplace (Stewart et al., 2016) .  \nDisparities in writing skills both reflect and contribute to inequities in our society. Certain groups, (e.g., people who identify as White and female) typically display stronger writing achievement, at least on the kinds of writing tasks that are highly valued in academic institutions and the professions (Roberts et al., 2017), with evidence that this leads to further inequities (Warren, 2013) . Writing matters, and thus it is important to understand why so many students experience writing as deeply challenging and how they can be encouraged to develop their writing skills.  \nFor decades, writing has been a major focus of research for the ETS Research and Development (R&D) division. The results of our efforts include substantial contributions to the measurement and development of student writing skills, with important implications for teacher professional development and the improvement of teaching practice.  \nWriting is hard to evaluate  \nIt is hard to teach writing without having mutually agreed upon standards of writing quality. To support this goal, ETS pioneered methods for getting human raters to evaluate writing quality accurately (Diederich et al., 1961) . In this early research, we found that different raters tend to pay attention to different things. Some raters care most about mechanics and grammar; others focus on the ideas or effectiveness of expression. It takes a great deal of work using carefully developed rubrics, examples, and practice to get raters to evaluate writing consistently, in part because raters have to pay attention to many different dimensions of the text (Deane, 2011) and because different aspects of the text may matter more in some contexts and for some audiences than for others. More recent studies ofrater cognition (e.g., Finn et al., 2020; Finn & Arslan, in press) showed that evaluating the quality of an essay is a difficult task even for professional, trained raters and that their performance can be strongly affected by the kind of training and feedback they receive.  \nWhat is hard for professional raters is, obviously, even more challenging for teachers and students. But toa very large extent, learning to write is learning how to evaluate writing. Effective writing instruction is all about supporting the provisioning and use of feedback. Effective writing teachers know how to evaluate student writing and provide effective feedback. Students become better writers when they learn how to evaluate their own writing and provide feedback to their peers (Graham et al., 2013) .  \nWriting isn't easy. . . . Few things are more important than providing teachers with the knowledge, tools, and support that  \nwill enable them to teach writing effectively.  \n2  \nAutomated tools can help  \nETS pioneered the use of natural language processing to evaluate student writing (Burstein, 2003; Burstein et al., 1998) . This led to the development of the CRITERION® online writing service, one of the first classroom writing tools to offer automated feedback on student writing (Burstein et al., 2004) . Later  \nstudies indicated that grade-level increases in writing performance can be measured using automated writing evaluation tools (Attali & Powers, 2008)","cbCaidzlmxrq7J3m","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaidzlmxrq7J3m","pdf",200711,"English","# Research Notes\n## The Importance of Assessing Student Writing and Improving Writing Instruction\n## Writing is hard to evaluate\n## Automated tools can help\n## The writing process matters","[{\"question\":\"Why is assessing student writing important for students’ future opportunities?\",\"answer\":\"Written communication is a premium skill in today’s knowledge economy, yet many students enter the job market with weak writing. The notes link writing proficiency to workplace readiness and job advantages.\"},{\"question\":\"What makes writing evaluation difficult even for trained raters?\",\"answer\":\"Different raters focus on different dimensions such as mechanics, grammar, ideas, and effectiveness of expression. Consistent evaluation requires careful rubrics, examples, practice, and attention to multiple text dimensions.\"},{\"question\":\"How can automated writing evaluation tools support writing instruction?\",\"answer\":\"The notes describe natural language processing approaches that provide automated feedback quickly and accurately across many features. Automated tools are not a substitute for human judgment but can help teachers assign more writing tasks and focus on substantive skills, and support students’ revision through models and visualizations.\"}]","Research Notes - The Importance of Assessing Student Writing and Improving Writing Instruction | PDF",1792048322,25]