Is There Any Way to Improve Your Child's Writing Skills ?

Writing has been and will continue to be a large part of all disciplines. Almost all courses have required writing assignments in order to receive credit. Writing tasks that are quite often assigned by the teachers serve two purposes. Teachers can find out if the students are developing clear conceptions about the subject, which, in turn, allows them to determine if they are being able to deliver the content effectively.

Acquiring the right skills to produce high quality writing requires a lot of practice. Ideally, students go through the process of writing, re-writing numerous times throughout their academic career to learn the craft of writing, and students do struggle to achieve perfection. Teachers also find the work load that is associated with such process overwhelming, because their responsibility is to provide a meaningful evaluation.

The responsibilities in terms of grading a paper vary significantly for a Math teacher as opposed to an English teacher. When a Math paper is graded, it is done based on just "right" and "wrong". Unfortunately, for a 'sincere' English teacher, there is no known shortcut, because it does not involve only identifying spelling mistakes. The overall analytical aspect with coherent arguments, sentence structure, vocabulary, redundancy - all of these things have to be taken into consideration. Therefore, this task is anything but easy.

As parents, we want our children to succeed too, but we do not always have the time or skills needed to assist them in the process. Luckily, some technologies are being offered now to be used as effective educational tools. Parents, who homeschool their children can also benefit from these web-based applications.

Here I will briefly describe two. I will make the names clickable for you to be able to check those out :

Criterion (offered by ETS) :

The web-based essay-scoring application Criterion, is an efficient tool for both teachers and students to evaluate student writing. The use of Criterion can lead to higher student and school achievement by giving students instantaneous feedback and guidance that would be heavily burdensome and impossible for a sole teacher to do in the same amount of time. Criterion empowers students by offering different ways to plan and edit essays independently, and on their own pace. Once they are submitted, the application gives students immediate feedback and a score report. Criterion aids teachers by freeing up their time spent editing and looking for grammatical, structural, style and usage mistakes. Educators can spend more time teaching and less time grading. Even though there are negatives as well to using an automated writing evaluation system, the benefits outweigh them.

Some limitations:

1. I have tried the program myself to see how it was grading my writing. The instantaneous feedback is impressive with the percentage scores and graphs of use of grammar, spelling mistakes, etc. However, if the students are to follow just the guidelines and the topics provided, this may not be a good tool for creative writing. I would say, because this is an educational tool provided by ETS, it is aimed at improving the skills for taking only the standardized tests.

2. Also, I have tried to stick to the topic given in the beginning and end of the essay prepared for submission and in the middle wrote whatever I wanted to (I am so slick !), and the program couldn't catch that ! So, it can be used as a great resource only by the students that are sincere and are eager to learn.

SWoRD (Scaffolding Writing and Reviewing in the Discipline) :

SWoRD is a computer based program designed to help facilitate the writing process by allowing students to submit essays into a data base. The essays are read and graded by student reviewers. Next, students are required to revise and resubmitted their essay for a grade. SWoRD generates a grade for each essay based on the reviews. So, each student writes a paper and then also grades the papers of fellow students. Through critiquing and getting critiqued they get suggestions as to how to improve the essay. Also, they get exposed to different writing styles. A teacher can easily register the class for such valuable resource. This program was developed by the University of Pittsburgh, PA.

So far, SWoRD has not been utilized by the high schools and the different grade levels because of the lack of knowledge about it.

Some limitations :

1. The use of this tool can be more time consuming compared to that of Criterion.

2. The program depends on the active participation of the students. I think the students can reap the most benefit if this is used during summer, when they do not have a load of assignments that are already due.

3. If the participating group is small, the students can become hesitant to give honest feedback even if it is supposed to be anonymous.

4. The feedback will also depend on the level of knowledge and experience of the participants. Therefore, it is better to have more participants in the group. However, that, in turn, will increase the workload.

As a parent, you can work with your child and his / her fellow students with the help of an advisor to get them enrolled in either one of these programs.