Psychometrics in Practice at RCEC

A broad range of topics is dealt with in this volume: from combining the psychometric generalizability and item response theories to the ideas for an integrated formative use of data-driven decision making, assessment for learning and diagnostic testing. A number of chapters pay attention to computerized (adaptive) and classification testing. Other chapters treat the quality of testing in a general sense, but for topics like maintaining standards or the testing of writing ability, the quality of testing is dealt with more specifically.\ud All authors are connected to RCEC as researchers. They present one of their current research topics and provide some insight into the focus of RCEC. The selection of the topics and the editing intends that the book should be of special interest to educational researchers, psychometricians and practitioners in educational assessment

A comparison of various machine learning algorithms and execution of flask deployment on essay grading

Students’ performance can be assessed based on grading the answers written by the students during their examination. Currently, students are assessed manually by the teachers. This is a cumbersome task due to an increase in the student-teacher ratio. Moreover, due to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, most of the educational institutions have adopted online teaching and assessment. To measure the learning ability of a student, we need to assess them. The current grading system works well for multiple choice questions, but there is no grading system for evaluating the essays. In this paper, we studied different machine learning and natural language processing techniques for automated essay scoring/grading (AES/G). Data imbalance is an issue which creates the problem in predicting the essay score due to uneven distribution of essay scores in the training data. We handled this issue using random over sampling technique which generates even distribution of essay scores. Also, we built a web application using flask and deployed the machine learning models. Subsequently, all the models have been evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. It is found that random forest algorithm outperformed the other algorithms with an accuracy of 97.67%, precision of 97.62%, recall of 97.67%, and F1-score of 97.58%

Automated Essay Evaluation Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

The goal of automated essay evaluation is to assign grades to essays and provide feedback using computers. Automated evaluation is increasingly being used in classrooms and online exams. The aim of this project is to develop machine learning models for performing automated essay scoring and evaluate their performance. In this research, a publicly available essay data set was used to train and test the efficacy of the adopted techniques. Natural language processing techniques were used to extract features from essays in the dataset. Three different existing machine learning algorithms were used on the chosen dataset. The data was divided into two parts: training data and testing data. The inter-rater reliability and performance of these models were compared with each other and with human graders. Among the three machine learning models, the random forest performed the best in terms of agreement with human scorers as it achieved the lowest mean absolute error for the test dataset

An Exploration of Automated Narrative Analysis Via Machine Learning

The accuracy of four machine learning methods in predicting narrative macrostructure scores was compared to scores obtained by human raters utilizing a criterion-referenced progress monitoring rubric. The machine learning methods that were explored covered methods that utilized hand-engineered features, as well as those that learn directly from the raw text. The predictive models were trained on a corpus of 414 narratives from a normative sample of school-aged children (5;0-9;11) who were given a standardized measure of narrative proficiency. Performance was measured using Quadratic Weighted Kappa, a metric of inter-rater reliability. The results indicated that one model, BERT, not only achieved significantly higher scoring accuracy than the other methods, but was consistent with scores obtained by human raters using a valid and reliable rubric. The findings from this study suggest that a machine learning method, specifically, BERT, shows promise as a way to automate the scoring of narrative macrostructure for potential use in clinical practice

Predicting the Quality of Short Narratives from Social Media

An important and difficult challenge in building computational models for narratives is the automatic evaluation of narrative quality. Quality evaluation connects narrative understanding and generation as generation systems need to evaluate their own products. To circumvent difficulties in acquiring annotations, we employ upvotes in social media as an approximate measure for story quality. We collected 54,484 answers from a crowd-powered question-and-answer website, Quora, and then used active learning to build a classifier that labeled 28,320 answers as stories. To predict the number of upvotes without the use of social network features, we create neural networks that model textual regions and the interdependence among regions, which serve as strong benchmarks for future research. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale study for automatic evaluation of narrative quality.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at the 2017 IJCAI conferenc

Evaluating Quadratic Weighted Kappa as the Standard Performance Metric for Automated Essay Scoring

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) tools aim to improve the efficiency and consistency of essay scoring by using machine learning algorithms. In the existing research work on this topic, most researchers agree that human-automated score agreement remains the benchmark for assessing the accuracy of machine-generated scores. To measure the performance of AES models, the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) is commonly used as the evaluation metric. However, we have identified several limitations of using QWK as the sole metric for evaluating AES model performance. These limitations include its sensitivity to the rating scale, the potential for the so-called kappa paradox to occur, the impact of prevalence, the impact of the position of agreements in the diagonal agreement matrix, and its limitation in handling a large number of raters. Our findings suggest that relying solely on QWK as the evaluation metric for AES performance may not be sufficient. We further discuss insights into additional metrics to comprehensively evaluate the performance and accuracy of AES models