The Effect of a Computer Tutor for Writers on Student Writing Achievement

Abstract

A Computer Tutor for Writers (CTW) was designed to provide procedural facilitation to high school students while they learn the skills and knowledge associated with composition writing. Four previous year-long studies helped identify how to facilitate specific elements of the writing process. The CTW was designed to combine lessons learned from these previous studies, and provide a comprehensive support system in which students could complete classroom writing assignments. Additional factors influencing the design of the CTW were field input from high school English teachers, cognitive research into the writing process, and the cognitive apprenticeship instructional strategy. A test and evaluation of the CTW conducted during a full school-year with regular writing classes produced writing achievement gains of up to one letter grade above control groups (N = 471). Teachers and students reported that the CTW appeared to improve both the ability of students to follow a complete writing process and their ability to achieve related learning objectives.

Tutoring Adolescents in Literacy: A meta-analysis

“…• computer tutoring, if well-structured and informed by theory, can effectively help students that have limited access to face-to-face tutoring (Britt & Aglinskas, 2002;Franzke et al, 2005;Hough et al, 2007;Rowley & Meyer, 2003;Rowley, Carlson & Miller, 1998);…”

“…Although we recognized the differences in some outcome measures within a study, conceptually we treated them as a general construct of literacy (e.g., reading, writing, vocabulary) and used all outcome measures to arrive at one average effect size for each study. Therefore, each study contributed one average effect size (ES) to the subsequent analyses with the following exceptions: (1) Britt and Aglinskas (2002) consisted of three independent sub-studies, so we calculated an effect size for each sub-study, resulting in three effect sizes; (2) Chi et al (2001) included two separate sub-studies, resulting in two effect sizes; (3) Hough et al (2007) compared in-person and webcam tutoring -two different types of tutoring -so we calculated separate effect sizes for each type, resulting in two effect sizes based on pretest-posttest gain scores; Rowley and Meyer (2003) compared three experimental groups with the control group, each involving different amounts of tutoring, so each of the three experimental-control group comparisons produced an effect size; Rowley, Carlson, and Miller (1998) included four independent sub-studies, only two of which had sufficient information to calculate effect sizes.…”

“…The reasons for this trend are not clear. Most of the students at grades 8 and 9 came from two studies (Rowley, Carlson & Miller, 1998;Rowley & Meyer, 2003), which examined computer-based tutoring and produced small effect sizes with very large weights. Otherwise, tutoring seems to be quite effective for adolescents.…”

Comparison of the Effectiveness of StyleWriter and Microsoft Word Computer Software to Improve English Writing Skills

“…In Rowley and Meyer's (2003) study, the Computer Tutor for Writers (CTW) software was tested and evaluated on 471 students. The study results revealed that with the use of CTW, there was an improvement in the students' ability to follow a complete writing process, and they learned more than their peers did through conventional writing instruction.…”

Embedding E-Mail in Primary Schools: Developing a Tool for Collective Reflection

“…Therefore, e-mail use has to be implemented in such a way that writing, typing and the actual sending and receiving become workable processes despite limited access to the Internet, limited time to spend, and limited skills to work with. And the precise influence of the computer remains rather unclear (Rowley & Meyer, 2003). They need to get engaged in writing to learn instead of learning to write, and have to be encouraged to reorganize their thoughts, and evaluate these with others.…”