Comparing Human and Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended Student Responses
  to Questions of Evolution
  Written responses can provide a wealth of data in understanding student
reasoning on a topic. Yet they are time- and labor-intensive to score,
requiring many instructors to forego them except as limited parts of summative
assessments at the end of a unit or course. Recent developments in Machine
Learning (ML) have produced computational methods of scoring written responses
for the presence or absence of specific concepts. Here, we compare the scores
from one particular ML program -- EvoGrader -- to human scoring of responses to
structurally- and content-similar questions that are distinct from the ones the
program was trained on. We find that there is substantial inter-rater
reliability between the human and ML scoring. However, sufficient systematic
differences remain between the human and ML scoring that we advise only using
the ML scoring for formative, rather than summative, assessment of student
reasoning.
