A New Formative Assessment Technology for Reading and Writing

Abstract

Advances in assessment technologies are affording teachers and students new ways to efficiently assess and track achievement while also better promoting learning. WriteToLearn is one such technology, a Web-based tool that integrates practice and assessment in reading comprehension with writing about what is learned. Based on the principle of immediate feedback, WriteToLearn is a combination of summative and formative assessment tools that seeks to encourage, instruct, and reward progress in reading and writing while it is happening. It does this by providing students with instant, computer-generated evaluations of the substantive content and expository quality of writing about what they are learning. Its real-time and long-term reports about student activity and progress give teachers and schools rich information for guiding classroom instruction and curricular decisions. This article discusses the motivation for and design of WriteToLearn, as well as studies of its accuracy, reliability, and effectiveness in the classroom.

Notes

1. Summary Street technology originated in academic research and development by Darrell Laham, Tom Landauer, Peter Foltz, and Walter Kintsch at the University of Colorado and New Mexico State University in the late 1990s with funding from DARPA and the MacDonnell Foundation. Iterative design, development, testing, response scoring, analysis, and investigative applications of the technology have since been implemented by Knowledge Analysis Technologies, now the Knowledge Technologies Group of Pearson, under PIs Tom Landauer, Peter Foltz, Scott Dooley, and Karen Lochbaum.

2. One teacher's experience with WriteToLearn is chronicled at http://www.pearsoned.com/ednews/may08pages/writetolearn.htm

3. Effectiveness is evidence evaluated in randomized experiments that carefully control how the intervention is applied. Efficacy compares results when some randomly assigned groups are given access to the intervention and others are not, under natural school use circumstances.