TEACHING & LEARNING
Improving Student Writing Outcomes With an
Automated Proofreader by Brad Hoover
I
n September, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released the results of its annual writing test, Te Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2012, suggesting that only a
quarter of 8th and 12th grade students have solid writing abili- ties. Te remaining 75 percent were unable to present their ideas in a clear, grammatically correct manner despite having access to word processing tools for the first time in the test’s history. Among the high school class of 2012, only 43 percent of students who took the SAT® met the SAT College & Career Readiness Benchmark, which indicates the student’s likelihood of achieving a B- average or higher during the first year of col- lege. Student SAT writing scores have declined five points since 2011 and consistently represent the lowest student outcomes of any section in the test.
Te fact is that American high schools are graduating students who do not have the capacity to write a five-paragraph essay. Colleges and universities are trying to pick up the slack, as students without writing skills have less-than-compelling career prospects. Some schools have established on-campus writing and tutoring centers to help students with any aspect of their writing, from specific assignments to general writing skills. Due to overwhelming demand, writing centers often can- not accommodate all students. A computer-assisted approach emerging at some leading institutions provides a solution. Software-based proofreading tools help students with spelling and grammar correction and instruction. Tis frees professors and tutors to focus on higher-level feedback around content and structure.
An accredited online university in the Midwest provides a compelling example. Its writing center has been a popular resource for students since its inception. However, even with 28 full-time staff members, its one-to-one tutoring services were not able to fully serve all students. Te director of the writing center needed to fill the gap, and began looking for tools that would help students identify spelling and grammar mistakes so staff could focus on higher-level feedback. Today, the university uses Grammarly, an automated
proofreading tool that assists students and others in correcting and learning written English. Grammarly’s algorithms act as an extra pair of eyes, checking for more than 150 types of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, and enhancing vocabulary usage. While algorithms inevitably produce some false alerts,
24 NOV/DEC 2012 •
TODAYSCAMPUS.COM
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