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

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 goal-setting interventions could increase intervention effectiveness. The present study investigated an individualized goal-setting intervention that provided a list of goals based on students' previous writing using automated writing evaluation. Participants were 345 academic track students from upper-secondary schools in Germany. 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). Students receiving individualized goal-setting instructions showed the largest revision performance compared to the other groups, with and without controlling for text length. 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.