Bridget McCrea asks, The technology promises to save time and tedium, but can English papers truly be assessed without the human touch of a teacher?
“In most cases there’s a closer correlation between the human and computer scores than there is between two human scores,” says Sandy Foster, lead coordinator in the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of Assessment and Accountability.
Janet Benincosa offers a page of videos, lesson plan templates, teaching standards, teacher evaluations formats, documents, and explanations to support WVA teachers whose students use the auto WVA Writes program.
It is an authorized adaptation of CTB/McGraw-Hill’s Writing Roadmap, an online writing tool that measures and tracks writing proficiency for students in grades 3 through 12. This Writing Roadmap utilizes validated and practice items that contain short prompts as well as reading passages for students to write about. Teachers can select writing assignments across five genres from CTB’s assignment library or they can create and use their own assignments.
The overview for the Writing Roadmap states, a study, “Online Writing Assessment in West Virginia” found consistent and statistically significant positive mean score differences on the state summative writing tests for students who practiced using Writing Roadmap software.
So, yes, Bridget, it seems that English papers can truly be assessed without the human touch of a teacher and such programs can result in increased scores on writing.
That answer raises two question, Is auto grading of writing a financially efficient way for school boards to spend resources? and Why don’t more school boards authorize the use of auto-grading of writing as WVA did?