On-Line Learning:
Vantage Learning Offers Student Writing Feedback at the Stroke
of a Keyboard
By Emily
Sherwood, Ph.D.
Imagine
a tenth grade, Spanish-speaking student who is reading
at a sixth grade level. She logs onto Vantage Learning’s MY
Access!—an online,
portfolio-based writing instruction program—and writes
a practice essay in English in preparation for an upcoming
state test. Voila! My Access! provides immediate feedback to the student in Spanish,
at a sixth grade reading level, so that she can improve her English writing techniques in a variety of
designated areas that will be evaluated on her state test.
Sound complicated?
Not to Harry Barfoot, Vice-President of Vantage Labs, which
developed the MY Access! program to improve student writing proficiency in response
to increased mandatory, high stakes state writing tests as
well as the new writing requirement on the SAT I and ACT
tests. “MY Access! is
a twenty-first century pencil,” explains Barfoot. “It’s
as if the students had a writing coach sitting behind them,
helping them through the writing process.” Students
are able to write and revise as often as they like; their
work is then analyzed based on over 300 semantic, syntactic,
and discourse characteristics and scored on a four or six
point scale. Teachers, who are theoretically freed up from
the demands of tedious paper correcting and able to spend
more time on instruction, can access the student writing
portfolios online to monitor their students’ progress,
understand areas of weakness, and tailor lesson plans to
meet their specific needs.
In justifying
the need for his product, Barfoot points
to the College Board-founded National Commission on Writing’s
2003 report to Congress, “The Neglected ‘R,’” that
called for a writing revolution to return writing to its
rightful place among the three “R’s” in
the classroom. The Commission, which surveyed 120 major corporations
employing eight million people, found writing to be a “threshold
skill” for hiring and promoting and a necessary passport
to professional opportunity in America’s increasingly
white collar society.
MY Access! is far from the only online writing program on the
market, but it may be the most popular, with several states,
including California and Pennsylvania, using it extensively
to help students meet state testing standards. In November,
California’s Los Angeles Unified School District
announced a three year, multi million dollar rollout of MY
Access! in 93 of its
secondary schools.
Key to the
success of MY Access! is what is widely regarded
as one of the most sophisticated scoring technologies in
today’s marketplace, IntelliMetric. Developed in-house
by Vantage Learning, IntelliMetric uses artificial intelligence
to emulate the process carried out by human scorers when
assessing a piece of writing. Until recently, few academicians
believed that an inanimate computer could effectively grasp
the art and nuance of writing. Yet in 1999, amidst a storm
of controversy, the Graduate Management Admission Council
(GMAC) became the first academic body to utilize automated
essay scoring in a large-scale assessment, the Graduate Management
Admission Test (GMAT), the standardized test for business
school admission. GMAC has just subcontracted with Vantage
Learning to use its IntelliMetric Essay Scoring System on
the GMAT’s. But Vantage Learning is not the only one
clamoring for a piece of the profitable computer-generated
scoring business. Educational Testing Service (ETS) sells
a program called Criterion which uses the “e-rater” technology
to score essays statewide in Indiana high schools. ETS, which
administers the SAT and GRE (Graduate Records Examination),
expects at least ten more states to adopt computerized essay
scoring in the next several years.
So
what’s
in store for Vantage Learning as the appetite for online
learning continues to grow among school districts and students? “We’re
developing a tighter alignment of our writing prompts to
the core basal reading textbooks so that we can more closely
match our programs to the scope and sequence teachers are
using in the classroom,” says Barfoot. “Take,
for example, a thematic unit that students are working on
in citizenship. There are different prompts in MY Access! that are about citizenship. Students will be writing
about citizenship and its importance, so we’re helping
them not only practice their writing, but we’re also
helping them develop higher order thinking in the process,” adds
Barfoot.
And
for the proliferating field of on-line learning—which incorporates
anything from computerized college degree programs to such
businesses as Growing Stars, an online personal tutoring
service based in California whose tutors live in India – the
opportunities are endless. Key among the issues for future
study will be quality assurance, particularly where public
monies are concerned. Indeed, the newly formed North American
Council for Online Learning (NACOL), launched in 2003 to
keep pace with the “rapid development in the field
of K-12 online learning,” notes in its website that “vigilant
monitoring is a must.” But for scores of students across
the country, the ease and comparatively low cost of logging
on will continue to drive the burgeoning online learning
industry.#
Read more
about online learning on the college level on page 20.