Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems confront two fundamental challenges: opaque "black-box" decision-making that limits educator trust, and insufficient validation across linguistically diverse educational contexts. This study proposes IRT-AESF, an innovative framework that bridges educational measurement theory and artificial intelligence by integrating item response theory (IRT) with deep learning. The framework generates three theoretically grounded psychometric parameters: student ability, item difficulty, and item discrimination, which provide transparent and interpretable explanations for scoring decisions. We rigorously evaluated IRT-AESF through 5-fold cross-validation on three large-scale datasets comprising 41,328 authentic essays from English and Chinese educational settings, including both classroom assessments and high-stakes examinations. Results demonstrate statistically significant improvements over competitive baseline models, achieving an 8.4% relative increase in quadratic weighted kappa while maintaining robust cross-lingual performance. This research advances the development of transparent, trustworthy automated assessment systems that deliver not only scores but meaningful diagnostic insights for educational practice.
Source: Behavioral Sciences
DOI: 10.3390/bs16040542
Authors: Wei Xia, Jin Wu, Jiarui Yu, Chanjin Zheng
Institution: East China Normal University
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,654
OpenAlex ID: W7150857264