Writing Practice in MyWritingLab
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Writing Practice in MyWritingLab (reliable automated writing assessment)
Research shows developing writers build confidence, reduce errors, and improve critical thinking skills the more they write. MyWritingLab's "Writing Practice" feature allows you to get your students writing more without burdening you with more papers to grade.
Driven by our Knowledge Analysis Technology (KAT) engine, Pearson's Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA) uses a unique implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which identifies semantic similarity of words and passages by analyzing large bodies of relevant text. For MyWritingLab, we selected writing prompts that will be of interest to today's students, received hundreds of student submissions, and then had the submissions calibrated by human readers. As a result of this process, LSA can accurately "understand" the meaning of new text written in response to a prompt much the same as a human reader. Both LSA and Pearson's IEA are grounded in solid, published academic research and proven by real world use over time, including high-stakes testing, such as the Pearson Test of English, the Maryland science assessment, and more.
As the first and only online application to combine discrete-skill diagnostics and remediation (Writing Skills) with combined-skills application (Writing Practice), MyWritingLab is a holistic and economical solution for developing writers.
Back to topIntelligent Essay Assessor
Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA) automatically assesses and critiques electronically submitted essays, providing assessment and instructional feedback as reliably as skilled human readers. IEA uses the Knowledge Analysis Technologies (KAT) engine to evaluate the meaning of text by examining whole written passages. The state-of-the-art KAT engine and IEA are grounded in solid, published academic research, real world use, and advances in cognitive science, computational linguistics, educational technology, and computer science.
The KAT engine is based on Knowledge Technologies' unique implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), an approach that generates semantic similarity of words and passages by analyzing large bodies of relevant text. LSA can then "understand" the meaning of text much the same as a human reader.
IEA provides an immediate overall evaluation as well as feedback on specific traits, spelling, and grammar errors. IEA also has built in detectors for highly unusual essays. IEA has been used in situations ranging from scoring for grade schools to assessing military leadership skills. It can be used in high-stakes testing as a second opinion or in formative evaluations. IEA's underlying KAT engine has proven reliability by scoring over a million essays ranging from middle school to medical school, in a variety of content areas.
View a fact sheet on IEA (PDF)
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The Knowledge Technologies group of Pearson creates unique technology for automated assessment of speech and text. Learn more.
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