Individualizing goal-setting interventions using automated writing evaluation to support secondary school students' text revisions

Background: Revising is central in the process of writing and for acquiring writing skills. Setting revision goals is challenging especially for novice writers: students do not revise frequently, especially in homework conditions that demand high levels of self-regulation. Empirical studies of goal-setting interventions providing a detailed list of goals show positive effects on students' revisions, and researchers have argued that individualizing such goalsetting interventions could increase intervention effectiveness.Aims: The present study investigated an individualized goal-setting intervention that provided a list of goals based on students' previous writing using automated writing evaluation.Sample: Participants were 345 academic track students from upper-secondary schools in Germany.Methods: We asked students to write a text in English as a second language (ESL) as homework and then to revise it. In a hierarchical sequence of four groups, we expanded the information to support students in self-evaluating their texts and setting appropriately challenging revising goals in a stepwise manner. Students received a textbook passage showing a list of process goals (all groups), an assessment rubric (groups two, three, and four), an automated performance score (groups three and four), and individualized goal-setting instruction based on their performance score and the textbook passage (group four).Results: Students receiving individualized goal-setting instructions showed the largest revision performance compared to the other groups, with and without controlling for text length.Conclusions: We discuss how goal-setting support in ESL writing can benefit from automated writing evaluation to provide individualized support and thus improve the effectiveness of goal-setting interventions in supporting students' revision performances.

Automated summary

This study investigated the challenges in setting revision goals for students and found that an individualized goal-setting intervention based on automated writing evaluation can significantly improve students' revision performance. The findings suggest that automated writing evaluation can provide support for personalized goal-setting in ESL writing.