EssayTagger was initially developed as a tool to help individual teachers. Now we're taking aim at unifying all writing assessment data across an entire school or district. Here's why this is valuable and here's how we'll do it.
The problem: Disparate writing assessments
In a typical school there's a wide array of teachers who assess writing throughout the year. And with the increasing emphasis on "reading and writing across the curriculum," those numbers are growing. English and Social Studies teachers are busy as ever grading essays, but now there are Math teachers who are assigning reflection paragraphs. PE teachers are assigning sportsmanship essays.
Unfortunately writing assessments are almost always isolated within the confines of each individual classroom. The History teacher knows that his students are struggling with using evidence in their writing, but he has no idea that his students' English teacher is frustrated with the same problem. There simply aren't any lines of communication across departments to share this information and collaborate on a solution.
But the worst offenders are the district writing assessments. Many schools will do a school-wide writing assessment that is scored on a standardized rubric which is then coded into a database so that administrators can pore over the results. These district writing assessments exist outside of the normal curriculum (e.g. in the middle of the Huck Finn unit the sophomores will be asked to write about texting while driving). Worse, the students rarely ever see the results and almost never receive any feedback. They're writing into a black hole. And, oddly enough, teachers often don't even see the results. They might see some bullet points on an institute day slideshow or get the data second-hand from their department head.
Disparate writing assessments are pure silliness.
Writing--and assessing--across the curriculum
We've bought into the value of writing across the curriculum and now it's time to unify assessment data across the curriculum.
Every writing assessment tells us more about each student and our school's overall trends. Assessment data shouldn't be cloistered within the walls of each classroom, but rather should be contributing to a rich web of highly interconnected data. This is the "web-ification" of the school structure; teachers need to think of themselves as part of a network instead of individual sovereign islands.
When Bobby's English teacher grades his essay, his History teacher should be able to see the results down to each individual skill being assessed. The district writing assessments should add to this pool of information and provide more insight to all of Bobby's teachers. The Culinary Arts teacher should know what strengths and weaknesses to expect when she assigns a research paper on launching your own restaurant. The school's writing center or peer tutors could benefit from a detailed skills profile for each student that comes for help.
