Formative assessment feedback to enhance the writing performance of Iranian IELTS candidates: Blending teacher and automated writing evaluation

Abstract

With the incremental integration of technology in writing assessment, technology-generated feedback has found its way to take further steps toward replacing human corrective feedback and rating. Yet, further investigation is deemed necessary regarding its potential use either as a supplement to or replacement for human feedback. This study aims to investigate the effect of blending teacher and automated writing evaluation, as formative assessment feedback, on enhancing the writing performance among Iranian IELTS candidates. In this explanatory mixed-methods research, three groups of Iranian intermediate learners (N=31) completed six IELTS writing tasks during six consecutive weeks and received automated, teacher, and blended (automated + teacher) feedback modes respectively on different components of writing (task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy). A structured written interview was also conducted to explore learners’ perception (attitude, clarity, preference) of the mode of feedback they received. Findings revealed that students who received teacher-only and blended feedback performed better in writing. Also, the blended feedback group outperformed the others regarding task response, the teacher feedback group in cohesion and coherence, and the automated feedback group in lexical resource. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the majority of the learners confirmed the clarity of all feedback modes and learners’ attitude about feedback modes was positive although they highly preferred the blended one. The findings suggest new ideas to facilitate learning and assessing writing and support the evidence that teachers can provide comprehensive, accurate, and continuous feedback as a means of formative assessment.