Dear Connecticut Educators,
My name is Al Green (not the singer) but you're Connecticut-based Measurement Consultant for Pearson Educational Assessment.
As you may know, the CONNECTICUT STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DIVISION OF TEACHING, LEARNING AND INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERSHIP has released RFP 994.
The purpose of this grant program is to create pilot sites that will allow the Connecticut State Department of Education to examine the effectiveness of using technology in the teaching of writing in Grades 6-12, including the use of artificial intelligence to provide specific, frequent feedback to students on their writing.
Up to $60,000 is available per district!
A copy of the RFP can be downloaded at the link below. Just copy the link into your browser.
Pearson is committed to helping you acquire this funding by offering WriteToLearn™ an innovative Web-based teaching tool that combines summary and essay writing activities.
I would be delighted to meet with you to discuss WriteToLearn. If you are interested, please utilize the contact information at the bottom of this email.
In the interim and due to time restrictions (RFP responses are due on February 20, 2009) I have taken the liberty of creating responses to key RFP questions as they relate to WriteToLearn. Please feel free to paste this verbiage into your RFP response.
Proposal Requirements
The Proposed Project Must Include The Following:
1) Web-based applications that provide feedback and scoring through artificial intelligence.
2) A full description of the anticipated benefits of the use of any additional online resources, software or peripherals, if included in the project.
RFP Answers from Pearson
What is WriteToLearn?
WriteToLearn is a complete online tool for building writing skills and developing reading comprehension for grades 4-12. Using WriteToLearn, students develop a skill that good readers naturally possess - the ability to summarize what they read. They practice essay writing and summarizing and build both writing and reading comprehension skills across the curriculum.
What are the benefits of using WriteToLearn?
WriteToLearn gives students the opportunity to practice their writing. The only way to learn to write is to practice with informative feedback. The same goes for reading; the two are inseparable. Learn to read and you learn to write, learn to write and you learn to read. WriteToLearn provides the opportunity for students to practice both of these valuable skills.
WriteToLearn is time efficient allowing teachers to assign many more writing and reading comprehension assignments to students without additional grading time.
WriteToLearn helps you focus your teaching. By observing students and using the Teacher Reports you can discover both individual and class strengths and weaknesses to help guide teaching.
WriteToLearn is flexible and easy to use. Teacher tools allow teachers to set scoring thresholds, manage and evaluate student progress easily, and to adjust the class roster and make assignments.
WriteToLearn tutors students to improve subject knowledge, as well as reading comprehension and writing skills by providing detailed feedback on content.
WriteToLearn allows students to tackle more difficult reading assignments by boosting their understanding and performance through automated evaluation.
How does WriteToLearn work?
WriteToLearn contains a Reading Comprehension Component and an Essay Component. Both components use the Knowledge Analysis Technologies (KAT) engine, a patented technology based on over twenty years of research and development. The KAT engine is based on the mathematical approach known as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which provides a sophisticated computer analysis of text.
The Reading Comprehension Component assesses the total content of a summary as well as the correlation between the summary content and that of the original reading passage. It compares the student's entire summary to each section of the assigned reading and returns feedback indicating how well the information in each section has been covered by the student's summary.
The Essay Component assesses the total content of an essay as well as the correlation between the essay's content and that of training essays previously scored by expert human readers. The Essay Component assigns a score to each essay based in part on the similarity of the content of the essay to that of the training essays.
Write to Learn offers the option to have reading passages read-aloud via the computer. There is also English to Spanish and Spanish to English functionality which allows direct translation of unknown vocabulary words. In addition, there are also spell check, grammar check and dictionary functions.
For more information please watch 4th graders and their dramatic improvement using WriteToLearn:
Regards,
Al Green
Measurement Consultant
Educational Assessment
2612 North Ave, #G7
Bridgeport, CT 06604
Office: 888-366-5195
Cell: 917-204-2692
Fax: 888-884-0537
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