Anchorage School District Counts on Vantage Learning to Improve Writing Scores

Sep 23

JupetongEducation, Online Education, School , , , , , , , , , No Comments

The Anchorage School District is kicking off the school year with a new addition to teaching and grading writing: Vantage Learning’s MY Access!®. The school district has incorporated the program in their curriculum for 6,450 of its students for the 2008-09 school year. To ensure teachers have full working knowledge of MY Access!, they participated in a seven-day MY Access! Train-the-Trainer program. It included interactive research components, instant feedback, and lively exercises, so they will be able to teach students how to take full advantage of the program.

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The Anchorage School District decided to implement the pilot program after using MY Access! in a small number of elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms in the district last year. As part of the new initiative, the Anchorage School District was awarded a grant from the Alaska Association of School Boards to supply mini-laptops to high school students for using MY Access! and other programs.

To use MY Access!, students write an essay based on a teacher’s assignment, and submit it to the Web-based system. The program instantly analyzes over 350 semantic, syntactic, and discourse characteristics, and scores the students on focus and meaning, organization, content and development, language use and style, mechanics and conventions, and overall writing proficiency. MY Access! instantly scores the essays on a scale of one to six, one being the lowest and six being the highest. This provides immediate feedback to students, and saves teachers valuable grading time so they can focus on personalized, targeted student instruction instead.

Based on Vantage Learning’s IntelliMetric® engine, MY Access! uses a rich blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and the virtualization of human expertise to accurately assess students’ competency and progress in reading and writing. In fact, MY Access! scores are consistently more accurate than human expert scorers, giving teachers the freedom to focus on one-on-one instruction, rather than extensive paper-grading, and helping students gauge their own progress through a rubric-scoring method.

Anchorage School District teachers who have used MY Access! have found the program helps pinpoint problem areas and gives students the inspiration and motivation to develop their writing from simple sentences to full essays. They say MY Access! has become a sought after instruction tool that students want to use and have even seen students revise an essay as many as twenty-four times over the span of three days. They look forward to using MY Access! even more this year and measuring how it continues to help teachers and students throughout the writing process.

ABOUT VANTAGE LEARNING

A pioneer in providing a Software as a Service (SaaS) model to deliver solutions to educators, Vantage Learning is recognized as the leader in cost-effective, high volume, secure, scalable online assessment and instructional programs for K-12 school districts. Leveraging technology such as artificial intelligence, natural language understanding, and Web-based learning objects, Vantage provides educators with high-quality tools and resources that motivate students to learn and that create meaningful interaction between students, parents, and teachers.

Acknowledged by industry leaders as the gold standard for scoring quality, consistency, reliability, and scalability of automated essay scoring using the patented IntelliMetric® engine, Vantage Learning has received accolades ranging from the prestigious CODIE Award for best instructional technology to recognition by Eduventures as one of the eight most innovative educational technology companies.

PRESS RESOURCES

Vantage Learning Web site: http://www.VantageLearning.com
MY Access! Web site: http://www.VantageLearning.com/myaccess
Anchorage School District: http://www.asd.k12.ak.us/

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