Several things have happened at one of the spk2wrt study sites over the past
week or two that are by turns interesting, exciting, frustrating, etc. I
report here on one of them.
This particular school is a middle school in Boston, overwhelmingly minority
children, primarily African-American. Jen Gold has already told a couple of
stories about successes she had with one of the students here. My brief story
is neither success nor failure, but rather simply a tale of what we hope is
the evolution of assistive technology.
Massachusetts, like many states, has adopted statewide achievement standards
at several grades and implemented testing to determine progress toward those
standards. Fortunately for many students, they are more than mere multiple-
choice tests, and include several essays. The students we deal with, however,
generally would do terribly on essays, if they could even attempt them. Well,
today, for the first time that I'm aware of, one of our students used DDW to
dictate his essay response to a question on censorship.
His performance further confirmed several things for me that I have come to
believe about the use of SR.
1) the use of SR allows many students to write more than they would in any
other format (other, perhaps, than dictating to a human scribe) - this boy
produced a page of text in a 30 minute stretch, whereas by hand it might have
been 2 or 3 sentences;
2) the use of SR doesn't necessarily make one a better writer - his effort was
not always grammatical, not well organized, and not particularly coherent - it
was initially mostly a long run-on sentence which rambled and did not
establish a clearly stated point of view;
3) the use of SR, despite the fact that it doesn't perform mpurpose of
developing some of those skills noted deficient in #2 above - although we
didn't have much time today to edit things, and I couldn't really provide much
input since it was a standardized test, he demonstrated the ability to go back
and make some changes easily and quickly given the environment and quality of
the original draft.
Have any others used SR for achievement testing in this way? Any thoughts?
Bob
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