Ellis Page, 81, a Developer of Computerized Grading, Dies
NY Times
Ellis B. Page, an education professor who developed an early computer program for grading written essays, died Tuesday near his home in McLean, Va. He was 81. The cause was pneumonia, his family said.
Dr. Page was widely published in the field of educational psychology and edited books on the subject. He spent many years researching the use of computers as learning tools. His work developing a computer essay grading program came decades before students would even use computers to write essays.
“He was doing something for which there wasn’t yet a use, which is why it was so forward thinking,” said Randy Bennett, a research scientist at Educational Testing Service.
Ellis Batten Page was born in 1924 in San Diego. He served in the Marine Corps in World War II. After graduating from Pomona College and teaching in secondary schools, he earned a master’s degree from San Diego State University and a doctorate in education from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1958. He retired as a professor of educational psychology from Duke University in 2002.
Dr. Page began testing his first program in 1966 while a professor at the University of Connecticut. Mainframe computers then filled entire rooms and were used mostly to make complex calculations quickly. “The idea that computers could work with language as they did with numbers was very novel,” said Michael Zieky, also of the Educational Testing Service and a former graduate student of Dr. Page’s.
The computer moves into essay grading: updating the ancient test. : An article from: Phi Delta Kappan
