Scoring Korean Written Responses Using English - Based Automated Computer Scoring Models and Machine Translation: A Case of Natural Selection Concept Test

This study aims to test the efficacy of English-based automated computer scoring models and machine translation to score Korean college students’ written responses on natural selection concept items. To this end, I collected 128 pre-service biology teachers’ written responses on four-item instrument (total 512 written responses). The machine translation software (i.e., Google Translate) translated both original responses and spell-corrected responses. The presence/absence of five scientific ideas and three naïve ideas in both translated responses were judged by the automated computer scoring models (i.e., EvoGrader). The computer-scored results (4096 predictions) were compared with expert-scored results. The results illustrated that no significant differences in both average scores and statistical results using average scores was found between the computer-scored result and experts-scored result. The Pearson correlation coefficients of composite scores for each student between computer scoring and experts scoring were 0.848 for scientific ideas and 0.776 for naïve ideas. The inter-rater reliability indices (Cohen kappa) between computer scoring and experts scoring for linguistically simple concepts (e.g., variation, competition, and limited resources) were over 0.8. These findings reveal that the English-based automated computer scoring models and machine translation can be a promising method in scoring Korean college students’ written responses on natural selection concept items.