April 2007 — eLearning
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A Virtual Treasure Trove
Behold My Access, made by Vantage Learning. My Access scores essays and provides diagnostic feedback to motivate students to revise and improve their writing. Harry Barfoot, the company’s vice president of marketing, says three-quarters of a million students currently use My Access, and the results are impressive. For example, in Los Angeles’ Birmingham High School, 81 percent of the students who used the program while preparing for the California High School Exit Examination passed the test, whereas students who didn’t use the program had a 46 percent pass rate.
GO, SPEED GRADER: Automated grading systems have
been shown to be as effective at essay
appraising as
classroom teachers—while working at an
extraordinarily faster pace.
“We digitize the thinking into software,” says Barfoot. That’s done with the company’s automated essay-scoring tool, IntelliMetric, which emulates the process carried out by human scorers, but with distinct advantages: It uses the same standards essay after essay, it’s not biased by an essay’s point of view, and it uses multiple judgments based on a variety of information sources.
In fact, in scores of studies pitting the system against “expert” essay graders, IntelliMetric agreed with the average expert score more often than any single expert’s score did. IntelliMetric was also found to be consistent with other appraisals of the same writing, including teacher judgments, SAT scores, and multiple-choice writing tests.
Students who used the program before a state exam nearly doubled the pass rate of students who didn’t.
Barfoot cites the technology’s advantages: 1) It frees up teachers. A teacher may spend several minutes on an essay; IntelliMetric can do a whole batch in seconds. 2) It motivates students. The program sees 12 to 15 revisions to a writing prompt such as “Do you believe thatviolence on TV influences violence in society?” because students get feedback so quickly. 3) With the home version, it’s always available. As Barfoot says, “We are, to a great extent, a 24-hour society.”
And that gets to the root of eLearning’s appeal. It’s the availability of these programs that frees students and teachers from the restrictions of conventional instruction—delivering multicultural experiences, more engagement, and ultimately, higher student achievement.
Neal Starkman is a freelance writer based in Seattle.
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