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With the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Open Education Solutions announced the winners of the $100,000 Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP) this morning in Washington DC. The top three teams, made up of international data scientists, developed predictive algorithms that were able to score thousands of essays very quickly with remarkable accuracy compared to expert graders.  MORE »

A writer in the Daily Iowan is worried about automated essay scoring killing creativity. He confused two issues. The online scoring engines use the same rubrics to score essays as human graders. The answer is more assessment not less, but much of it will occur in the background behind engaging learning activities.   MORE »

There was lots of press on the OpenEd-led Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP) this week. Unfortunately, most of the stories made dumb robot jokes (no robots here, just predictive algorthms), suggested they would replace teachers (no, just increase the amount of writing on tests and in classrooms), or gave air time to a prof that thinks Word is better than essay graders (no, it's a couple generations behind).   MORE »

A foundational benefit of the shift to personal digital learning that will occur in this decade worldwide is formative assessment that runs in the background all day long providing periodic structured feedback to every student. It will enable customized learning pathways. It will empower better teaching. It will boost motivation, persistence, and the quality of student work products. It will extend achievement and degree completion. That’s the real story.  MORE »

The Hewlett Foundation funded Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP) released about 2300 essays to the 140 contestants this week. They have until the end of the month to score the essays with the highest possible agreement with expert graders. The top three competitors will share $100,000 prize purse to be awarded May 9 in Washington DC. In a recent private vendor demonstration, nine testing companies showed that “Machine scoring engines did as well or better than the human graders.”  MORE »

Results of an extensive vendor demonstration of automated essay scoring capabilities is presented today at NCME in Vancouver. The goal of the Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP) is to encourage more writing on state tests and in classroom. We want teachers to have more help providing constructive feedback.  MORE »

With support from the Hewlett Foundation, OpenEd designed and managed a nine vendor demonstration of the effectiveness of automated essay scoring systems. Most scoring engines proved to be as effective as human graders. The demonstration supports the announced direction of two state testing consortia, PARCC and SBAC, that intend to incorporate a significant amount of writing in their tests and plan to use automated scoring to reduce cost and speed turnaround.   MORE »

America’s competitive advantage around educational technology will not be challenged by technology capacity of the users. Rather, this recent blog posts focuses on an age old barrier - fear of change.  MORE »

What roles will scholarship and leadership plan in the next generation of blended schools? Bryan Setser details recent learning at the Cyber STEM Tools Conference in Berkley, CA.   MORE »