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Grading student work is a necessary, but often onerous and time consuming task. Most teachers find it burdensome. Maintaining consistency in grades and feedback becomes difficult after a few hours of assessment.
Offering multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate their abilities in the same subject requires too much time for the teacher in terms of grading. However technology can make this possible.
Imagine setting an essay topic for a class of 30 students, getting them to enter their responses on a computer, submitting it to a system, and receiving grades and feedback in seconds.
The teacher’s only involvement in the process is through providing advice on the process and giving guidance to the students about the feedback. And then imagine doing this several times in a class period.
This is what they can do with the NAPLearn online real time essay grading system. NAPLearn is an online Automated Essay Practice and Grading System based on the NAPLAN grading rubric.
Scores and feedback are provided within seconds as NAPLearn is powered by the Rembiont Essay Analysis Engine, which is based on grading simulation methodology developed by a research team at an Australian University.
The aim of NAPLearn is to enable Australian students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 to practice essay writing online at school, and home, in preparation for their NAPLAN writing tests.
The feedback they receive on their work is designed to enable the student, together with teachers, and parents, to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the essay.
NAPLearn uses proprietary algorithms based on Natural Language Processing techniques and machine learning models to analyse essays. It then uses this information to assign scores against various NAPLAN grading criteria. Essays can be on any topic, as topic training is not needed.
Another benefit for schools is that teachers can set an essay question for all students in a class, and receive results for the entire class within seconds of students' submitting their writing. There's no need to spend hours marking work and providing individual feedback. And, once they are marked, students can access tutorials to help improve their scores.
In addition to a numerical essay score, NAPLearn provides a comprehensive visual and textual feedback to enable the teachers and parents to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the essay, and areas for improvement with the student. The feedback includes scores against the NAPLAN grading criteria of:
• Audience
• Ideas
• Character and setting
• Cohesion
• Paragraph
• Sentence Structure
• Spelling
Once students receive feedback, they can immediately make improvements and then resubmit the essay. This process can be repeated as many times as necessary, and teachers have been impressed by the level of improvement the software has been able to create.
Examples of feedback
The following is sample feedback for the NAPLAN criteria Audience.
Audience: The writer's capacity to orient, engage and affect the reader
Intermediate 4/6 (67%)
Good job!
Your narrative demonstrates some understanding of the intended audience and you are developing your ability to create interest for this audience through language choices.
This means that there are opportunities to engage your audience in the topic by including more details in order to impact their emotions.
To improve further, consider events and language that will excite your audience.
Who is your intended audience? How can your language choices engage them? What details can you include to connect with your audience's emotions to the people, places and events in your narrative?You can also refer to the NAPLearn Audience tutorial for further ideas on how to make your story more interesting, click the View button to the right.
Although the scores provided by NAPLearn are not identical to the scores that the essay will be awarded from an actual NAPLAN test, in most cases they will be similar. On various tests involving hundreds of essays the Rembiont Grading Engine had a correlation of 0. 79 to 0. 92 with human markers, which is similar to, or exceeds, that between different human markers grading the same essays.
NAPLearn is used by Government and Faith-based schools in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. It is approved by the Western Australian Education Department for use in Government schools in that state. A number of Australian tutoring organisations also use it.
OLNA support for WA
A version of NAPLearn is used by our partner company OLNA Support in about 100 schools in Western Australia.
It was designed and created by two Perth-based teachers who wanted a learning tool to help support students with practice materials for the Western Australian Online Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (OLNA).
One school had a student who was a poor writer, who after several iterations on NAPLearn surprised his teachers with the quality of his final version of his essay. Another reported saving 12 hours of marking in a week.
OLNA Support also reports on if their client schools had increased attendance at OLNA writing practice classes.
Students and parents enjoy it, too
Students with writing challenges have been quick to adopt NAPLearn, as they see it as a non-threatening environment to experiment with their writing. We receive positive feedback from parents who have taken individual subscriptions for home use.
Teachers are seeing a decline in writing test results, and NAPLearn helps address this by helping students to practice their essay writing and receive feedback anywhere, anytime.
To find out more about NAPLearn and potential applications for your school, including a free trial, contact Dr. Robert Williams at [email protected]
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