Exploring the mechanism of technology-enhanced formative assessment through students' behavioral and cognitive task engagement

Abstract

Due to advances in educational technology, students receive automated feedback on their writing, requiring understanding of its mechanism of effectiveness. Although it is assumed that behavioral and cognitive task engagement play a crucial role in the effect of feedback on writing outcomes, their impact remains partially understood. We conducted an experimental study, comparing two groups of secondary school students who completed a writing task and revised their drafts with or without feedback (automated feedback [ n = 348] vs. no feedback [ n = 227]). We assessed students' behavioral task engagement using a linguistic similarity measure (i.e., edit distance) and students' cognitive task engagement using self-reports. Our results indicate that behavioral task engagement mediated the effect of automated feedback on writing performance. We found no mediating effect of cognitive task engagement. The findings imply that in writing, performance gains due to automated feedback emerge when students show proactive behavior in text revision. Educational Relevance Understanding how automated feedback supports students' writing skills allows educators to optimize learning environments. We provide evidence that automated feedback supports writing performance by engaging students in revisions of their texts. For educators, this underscores the importance of feedback that invites action and supports students in making revisions.