Scaling Up Writing in the Curriculum: Batch Mode Active Learning for Automated Essay Scoring

Automated essay scoring (AES) allows writing to be assigned in large courses and can provide instant formative feedback to students. However, creating models for AES can be costly, requiring the collection and human scoring of hundreds of essays. We have developed and are piloting a web-based tool that allows instructors to incrementally score responses to enable AES scoring while minimizing the number of essays the instructors must score. Previous work has shown that techniques from the machine learning subfield of active learning can reduce the amount of training data required to create effective AES models. We extend those results to a less idealized scenario: one driven by the instructor's need to score sets of essays, in which the model is trained iteratively using batch mode active learning. We propose a novel approach inspired by a class of topological methods, but with reduced computational requirements, which we refer to as topological maxima. Using actual student data, we show that batch mode active learning is a practical approach to training AES models. Finally, we discuss implications of using this technology for automated customized scoring of writing across the curriculum.