ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1569529
Standards-Aligned Annotations Reveal Organizational Patterns in Argumentative Writing at Scale
Provisionally accepted
- Cambium Assessment, Inc., Washington, D.C., United States
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While scoring rubrics are widely used to evaluate student writing, they often fail to provide actionable feedback. Delivering such feedbackespecially in an automated, scalable mannerrequires the standardized detection of finer-grained information within a student's essay. Achieving this level of detail demands the same rigor in development and training as creating a high-quality rubric. To this end, we describe the development of annotation guidelines aligned with state standards for detecting these elements, outline the annotator training process, and report strong interrater agreement results from a large-scale annotation effort involving nearly 20,000 essays. To further validate this approach, we connect annotations to broader patterns in student writing using Latent Class Analysis (LCA). Through this analysis, we identify distinct writing patterns from these finegrained annotations and demonstrate their meaningful associations with overall rubric scores. Our findings show promise for how fine-grained analysis of argumentative essays can support students, at scale, in becoming more effective argumentative essay writers.
Keywords: argumentative writing assessment, Writing feedback, Rubrics < Assessment, machine learning, Automated scoring and feedback
Received: 01 Feb 2025; Accepted: 15 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Burkhardt, Han, Woolf, Boykin, Rijmen and Lottridge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Amy Burkhardt, Cambium Assessment, Inc., Washington, D.C., United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.