The ability to revise in response to feedback is critical to students’ writing success. In the case of argument writing in specific, identifying whether an argument revision (AR) is successful or not is a complex problem because AR quality is dependent on the overall content of an argument. For example, adding the same evidence sentence could strengthen or weaken existing claims in different argument contexts (ACs). To address this issue we developed Chain-of-Thought prompts to facilitate ChatGPT-generated ACs for AR quality predictions. The experiments on two corpora, our annotated elementary essays and existing college essays benchmark, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ACs over baselines.

Automated writing evaluation systems can improve students’ writing insofar as students attend to the feedback provided and revise their essay drafts in ways aligned with such feedback. Existing research on revision of argumentative writing in such systems, however, has focused on the types of revisions students make (e.g., surface vs. content) rather than the extent to which revisions actually respond to the feedback provided and improve the essay. We introduce an annotation scheme to capture the nature of sentence-level revisions of evidence use and reasoning (the ‘RER’ scheme) and apply it to 5th- and 6th-grade students’ argumentative essays. We show that reliable manual annotation can be achieved and that revision annotations correlate with a holistic assessment of essay improvement in line with the feedback provided. Furthermore, we explore the feasibility of automatically classifying revisions according to our scheme.