Published by the Alliance for Excellent Education, the report examines whether formative assessment can improve students’ writing skills and what techniques are best to help them improve.

Student writing skills can be improved by having teachers provide students regular feedback, track their progress, and encourage them to evaluate their own skills, finds a new report, “Informing Writing: The Benefits of Formative Assessment.”

Merit web-based writing programs can help teachers accomplish the three tasks outlined in the report.

The screen shot below shows how teachers can:

• View student writing within an online portfolio to give feedback. (See “View Student’s Work” in blue box.)
• Determine if students have viewed editing sections for self-assessment purposes. (See “Section Progress” in green box at left in the screen shot.)
• Monitor the writing progress of entire classes as they work. (All student records can be accessed by using the double arrows shown at top of screen shot.)

Click here to enlarge image.

Here is a link to the report:
http://www.all4ed.org/files/InformingWriting.pdf

Click here to learn more about Merit web-based writing programs.

For information, pricing, tours, and implementation ideas go to:

• English Basic Web Suite
• English Intermediate Web Suite
• English Advanced Web Suite

During the competition Watson was able to access answers to a variety of questions. However, it wasn’t superior to humans on every question. The machine did better in certain categories than others.

It’s important for us to think about what computers can and can’t do. Computers can’t create without input from humans. They can only respond to human programming.

At Merit, we have significant expertise in knowing what technologies are capable of doing for people. We have high standards about how to make computers useful instructional tools. We know how to make computer programs that are relevant and fit into a context for people that they can relate to. It also helps that we are very good at explaining to people how to use a program. This level of support enhances the teaching and learning processes immeasurably.

Two new Merit programs, Grammar Fitness Online and Confused Words Fix-Up, are good examples of the need for this level of expertise.

In many schools today, particularly at the secondary level, students need remedial help. However, schools do not have the structure, personnel, or budget to provide this service. Remediation needs to be done in class in a way that enables teachers to track progress for diverse groups of learners.

Grammar Fitness and Confused Words Fix-Up provide this service in key areas of English grammar and vocabulary. The programs are easy for instructors to learn to use. Plus, teachers receive free and unlimited support from Merit support specialists.

In that time, many instructors and students have shared with us best practices for using them.  Based on their input we’ve posted new teaching tips for the writing process on our web site.

Click here for the new process writing teaching tips.

After the reading level of mothers, neighborhood income level was the next largest determinant of children’s academic achievement, observed analysts in a study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and published in a recent edition of Demography.

The researchers undertook the study to isolate factors contributing to the disparity in academic achievement observed between children in low-income and affluent neighborhoods.

Merit Software reading programs have long been used by both adults and by children in late elementary and secondary schools to improve basic literacy skills.

Merit programs are effective because they provide personal, immediate, descriptive feedback to learners. Users learn strategies that they can apply to subsequent after using the programs.

Additionally, Merit’s new web-based programs provide flexibility to deliver content at multiple locations to suit the needs of a variety of users.

Learn more about the study at the NIHCD web site.

In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The following are among the techniques that have been shown to be effective for motivated students:

• Alternating study locations, which improves retention.

• Mixed-practice: that is, the idea that studying distinct but related skills in one sitting is more beneficial than focusing intensely on one skill at a time.

• Spacing study sessions, which improves later recall without requiring students to put in more overall effort.

• Tests and quizzes, which can be very effective tools for learning. The process of retrieving an idea improves later recall.

In addition, the article challenges the idea that “forgetting” is bad for learning. Forgetting offers opportunities to relearn something and to reinforce awareness and understanding of the subject.

This article also helps explain why Merit Software is such an effective learning tool for so many users – from school students to adult learners.  The design of Merit programs is aligned with all of the cognitive techniques outlined in the article and facilitates maximum learning.

• Merit programs provide both focused and mixed practice of a variety of related skills.

• The programs are organized with logical stopping points. Progress monitoring enables students to stop and then resume working on skills over several sessions.

• Students are given many opportunities to apply and reinforce their learning with Merit. If students forget a skill or need to refresh their knowledge of a skill, the programs will direct them to suitable activities to relearn it.

• Merit’s learning platforms enable students to alternate their study locations with ease. Networked versions let students log on to different computers in the lab or classroom. The online versions may be accessed anywhere, anytime.

 
Learn more about Merit Software at www.meritsoftware.com

Read “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits”.

According to Carolyn Reicher, Adult Literacy and Learning Advocate for the Calgary Public Library, approximately 40 percent of adults in the province of Alberta do not have the literacy skills they need to reach their full employment potential in a knowledge-based economy.

“It’s not that these individuals can’t read at all, but they may not be able to read well enough to follow instructions in an e-mail from their boss, navigate the Internet well enough to search for jobs, read a map, or understand a company’s safety manual,” she explained.

Not everyone is convinced employers should be asked to take on the role of offering literacy programs.

“Taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year on the kindergarten to Grade 12 education system and if students are coming out and they can’t read and write then that’s probably where more attention needs to be placed,” said Colin Craig, Canadian Taxpayers Federation prairie director. “School boards should explain why that’s happening.”

Merit Software programs have a strong track record of helping schools and tutors improve literacy skills of students. However, these programs have an equally long history of helping adults in workplace settings improve their literacy skills.

Merit is effective for adults because the programs tutor them while they work. Built-in feedback and automatic scoring help learners’ review and relearn concepts they may have once been taught, but have now forgotten.

In addition, the content of Merit programs is not juvenile in any way. The structure of the programs is designed so students can learn at their own pace and advance when they demonstrate readiness.

Read the complete Calgary Herald article here.

However, nearly 60% of English-language learners in California’s high schools have failed to become proficient in English despite more than six years of a U.S. education, says the report’s sponsor – Californians Together, a coalition of 22 parent, professional and civil rights organizations.

“The situation is alarming and urgent,” said Laurie Olsen, the study’s author. “These kids are a large part of our future. But if we don’t have programs that powerfully bring them into English, we’re going to end up increasingly with a state of kids who are undereducated.”

The report calls for new data collection systems to monitor long-term English language learners and better teacher training and curriculum.

Here at Merit Software, we design programs to help students’ master core academic skills. Teachers can easily use the new online edition of Grammar Fitness and the online Punch writing programs to help English language learners stay focused and interested in gaining the skills they need for academic success.

Grammar Fitness is known for providing personal help and feedback for English language learners of a broad range of skill abilities. The new web based version measures progress and tracks time-on-task for teachers and students. It also has features to enhance online communication between instructors and students.

The major reason students fail is poor grammar, reports CBC News.

Part of the blame should go to cellphone texting and social networking sites, says Joel Postman, the author of SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.

Bad grammar may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one’s career if used at work.

“It would say to me . . . ‘Well, this person doesn’t think very clearly, and they’re not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they’re not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can’t spell, they can’t punctuate,’ ” he says.

The good news is that Merit Software has just launched a new, online edition of Grammar Fitness to help students and instructors cope with this problem.

The i3 grants are open to public schools, nonprofits, and universities. All innovations must have a rigorous research base to be considered for the grant.

We believe there are opportunities for educators to use all Merit Software programs within the i3 guidelines.

The process to apply will happen very quickly. The Department is hosting informational webinars and workshops to guide potential applicants this month.

To discuss ways to work with us and learn how to apply for the i3 grants, using Merit programs, please contact us.

To learn more about the Investing in Innovation (i3) grants, click here