SLWIS Newsletter - March 2011 - 0 views
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several problems are inherent in machine scoring. First, though Ferris (2003) claimed that students will improve over time if they are given appropriate error correction and that students use teacher-generated feedback to revise things other than surface errors, students rarely use programs like MY Access! to revise anything other than surface errors (Warschauer & Grimes, 2008); paragraph elements, information structure, and register-specific stylistics are largely ignored. Second, although teachers can create their own prompts for use with the program (more than 900 prompts are built into MY Access! to which students can write and receive instantaneous feedback.), MY Access! will score only those prompts included in the program. Third, regarding essay length, in many cases, MY Access! seems to reward longer essays with higher scores; consequently, it appears that MY Access! assumes that length is a proxy for fluency.
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Overall, students’ opinions regarding MY Access! were mixed; students found useful aspects as well as aspects they termed less helpful.
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Some students found working with the program very helpful in discipline, encouraging multiple revision. Others liked working with the many tools provided, finding them very helpful in the revision process. On the other hand, some students, lacking basic computer skills, found the program stressful and unusable. Others were discouraged by the seeming overabundance of feedback; in some cases, writers found it overwhelming, so they tended to disregard it. Our most disheartening finding: When some of the students were unhappy with their scores, they found ways to raise them by simply inserting unrelated text to their essays.
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"Though Crusan (2010), Ericsson and Haswell (2006), and Shermis and Burstein (2003) offered a more thorough treatment of machine scoring in general, in this article, I concentrate on one program―MY Access! (Vantage Learning, 2007)―briefly describing it and discussing a small study conducted in a graduate writing assessment seminar at a midsize Midwestern university in which graduate students examined second language writers' attitudes about using the program as a feedback and assessment tool for their writing in a sheltered ESL writing class" (¶2).