Confident assessment of children´s handwritten responses

This paper introduces a novel approach for the automatic assessment of children´s responses to standardised English exam questions. The constrained nature of the question and answer medium is exploited to produce an automatic assessment mechanism that is both highly accurate and produces a reasonable level of response yield. It is shown that the novel approach can achieve 100% scoring accuracy on 44% of all responses compared to a traditional lexical approach that has an error rate of 41%. When a thresholding method, similar to that used in the novel approach is applied, the traditional approach can achieve an accuracy of 100% but with a response yield of only 5%. The approach introduced in this paper is thus shown to have a significant advantage over the traditional lexical based assessment.