My Dirty Secret
Two years ago, I revealed I had a dirty secret. What was it?
I used Pearson (since rebranded as Savvas Learning Company) EssayScorer.
Yes, that dreaded product that in some iteration probably scores my students’ state test writing. That anathema heralding the end of writing instruction from living, breathing teachers, because why pay us to give feedback when kids can plug their work into a computer and it automatically spits out star ratings for the Six Traits?
I used the EssayScorer…and I liked it.
Don’t take my English teaching degrees away just yet!
Want to know how I used it? As another tool in my box of strategies, another motivator and skill to be unlocked. Because you know what the EssayScorer gave that I often can’t with 150+ students? Instant feedback. Incentive to improve.
We started our week with a ten minute draft inspired by Georgia Heard’s “Querencia” from Writing Toward Home. I called it our “sneeze” — that writing to discover that I love so much. We plugged that quickwrite into the program and guess what? The scores weren’t very good. “Why am I getting two stars in ‘ideas’? What are ‘conventions’?” At my bidding, my students clicked around, they fiddled. They watched stars move up or down.
The next day, we read two final draft mentor texts — my own model and a student model from Teen Ink. We asked, “What is each paragraph talking about? How can I use these writer’s moves to inspire my own work?” We returned to the draft we created in Google Docs and added to it. Some snuck over to EssayScorer and plugged their revised draft into the program. “Hey, my ‘organization’ increased by two whole stars!” I nodded. Isn’t it amazing how our scores improve when we have more to say?
After more drafting, I introduced them to the Snapshots revision strategy from Barry Lane. We played around in our notebooks, zooming in and out while describing various pictures. By the fifth day, we returned to our drafts, finalizing them for submission in EssayScorer. Now guess what? Their average overall score was 5 out of 6 stars.
It’s not a perfect tool by any means. As someone who is exploring the un-grading philosophy of people like Sarah Zerwin, I find the fact that EssayScorer assigns “points” as problematic. Sometimes a student would add one period and the score would rise in one trait and drop in another. I don’t totally understand how it works, but I know that for students’ writing skills to improve, they need volume of practice. We like to say, “Quality over quantity” — but in a skill-based classroom like English, “Quality quantity” is what actually grows abilities.
Now, as part of the National Writing Project’s Ahead of the Code project, I’m planning to return to this tool and use a similar process throughout the year. My students know I don’t think it’s a *great* tool — and the fact that students asked me to sit with them and conference the drafts confirms it certainly can’t replace me — but I believe it is a useful tool that pushed my students to improve over the course of the week in a really concrete way. I want to see what happens with my writers if they are receiving even more feedback and using a tool like EssayScorer regularly in our writing practice.
P.S. My essay earned six stars in all categories except for conventions. EssayScorer doesn’t like my artful use of fragments. Oh well. Their loss.
**Portions of this article were originally published on my own blog Katieswrite.
