Automated Scoring: 5 Things To Know, And A History Lesson
Karen Lochbaum earned her Ph.D. in computer science at Harvard University. At the time, she was at the forefront of new research about using computers to interpret language—but she didn't want to follow many of her peers into academia.
"I wanted to write software and make stuff," she says.
Karen stayed true to those aspirations, turning her talent as an up-and-coming software developer into work with Pearson. Today, she is Vice President of Automated Scoring at Pearson.
Karen worked for a time at Bell Laboratories during her academic studies.
They were working with something called Latent Semantic Analysis. It was an early form of online search technology, applied to the dense information in thousands of pages of yellow pages. Telephone companies wanted their customers to have a better, easier, faster experience than they were having thumbing through those thousands of pages.
"Before this kind of technology," Karen says, "you had to know that 'doctors' were listed in the 'physician' section, or 'drugstores' were listed as 'pharmacies.'"
"Latent Semantic Analysis helped us develop ways for computers to learn about words and recognize other words and phrases that mean the same thing," Karen says.
"It was an early form of online search technology, applied to the dense information in thousands of pages of yellow pages."
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"The process gives students immediate, detailed feedback—and it allows teachers to do more teaching."
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5 Things you need to know about automated scoring
Educators, students and parents have asked for quicker results of student performance on standardized testing to help inform teaching and learning. Automated scoring, which is based on and used in combination with human scoring, can help us deliver on that goal.
So, what exactly is it? Automated scoring uses a computer to score open-ended test questions like essays. Experts train a computer – pulling on human inputs — to create a learning algorithm that can score an assessment as accurately as human scorers.
As this technology may be new to many, we understand that there may be some uncertainty about automated scoring. That’s why we’ve put together a list of five things you should know about automated scoring when used for assessments: