As states and school systems struggle with ever-shrinking budgets, and as the march towards on-line schools becomes ever-quickening, education providers and vendors have begun to investigate robo-readers as an effective (read "monetarily efficient") tool for writing instruction. A great debate, subsequently, has ensued: Could these things possibly be any good? Science World Report article.
I am currently piloting the WriteToLearn program (Pearson) for my district. I teach language arts to 100 seventh graders. The WTL program purports to analyze the writer’s semantics (meaning), and it uses the Six Traits model as its framework -- IDEAS; ORGANIZATION; CONVENTIONS; WORD CHOICE; SENTENCE FLUENCY; VOICE. Interestingly, it uses the same type of algorithmic analysis that the Dept. of Homeland Security uses to sift through and find commonality among millions of emails, websites, etc. The system does a serviceable job, I feel, in helping to provide students with quick, meaningful feedback when they are in the early stages of the draft/revision process (when they ask, Is this good!?!?) -- especially when it is a roomful of 30 students who all want immediate feedback. I would not, however, dream of using this program as the final assessment of a piece: the analysis simply misses too much of the nuance (and meaning, even) that developing writers bring to their pieces, albeit sometimes awkwardly. In that respect, a fellow writer needs to be the final judge.
I wholeheartedly agree that automated systems such as WTL will not ever be able to replace an instructor who knows what he or she is doing (OK, probably not ever). Perhaps that is the rub here: there are far too many “writing” instructors out there who don’t know how to teach writing well -- they know it when they see it, but they can’t teach it. And this is by no means entirely the fault of the teacher; even pharmacists sign up for professional development to stay on the top of their game. I wish, certainly, that we would spend as much money on professional development for writing teachers as we seem bent on spending for these automatic programs. But school systems are in a budget panic, and I recognize that they are looking 10 years down the road and not just at next year.
To be sure, when pondering the future of education, we live in curious, tumultuous times. I always shake my head when I see the 7th and 8th grade football teams practicing. Each team fields 70-80 players. Each team then fields 13-15 coaches to help the players in specific areas such as receiving, offensive line, defensive line, special teams. Coaches see their players for 7-12 hours a week for practice and games. Teams start weight training in March, and spring practice in May. These players will receive about 210 hours of practice and feedback before the first scrimmage. My academic team of 100 students, on the other hand, has 4 core teachers, each of whom sees his or her students for a total of about 210 hours for the entire school year. Until we as a society pledge to support learning with the same volunteer energy and money that we support our extracurricular activities, I would argue that we are always going to have, for the most part, an under-educated student body -- and a society of poor writers.
