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The Impact of Online Essay Tutors on Student Writing Skills
Online essay tutors can provide immediate, automated feedback on students’ writing that mirrors the kind and frequency of feedback provided by in-class writing instructors. However, we have limited understanding of the feasibility and learning outcomes associated with integrating these new technologies into K-12 language arts education settings. This research is the first to examine the cognitive and academic engagement when a group of 8th-grade language arts students (N = 101; 88% free and reduced lunch) utilized an online essay tutor with automated feedback on persuasive essays. The findings indicate that the majority of students were able to successfully navigate the tutor, rendering immediate, automated feedback.
These results suggest that, on a cognitive level, students are prepared to utilize automated feedback. However, evidence indicated that the majority of students ignored the automated feedback. A subgroup of students, however, benefited from the immediate, automated feedback, evidence that automated feedback can improve academic writing during early adolescence. These findings offer both promising and alarming insight into automated feedback technology, suggesting it may be beneficial for only a subset of students or that integration into classroom settings needs to be more purposefully structured.
Students who used an online essay tutor demonstrated a higher level of writing skill, as measured by the program, than students who did not receive the training. The students received no other instruction in writing. Daily training sessions lasted an average of three months, depending on the rate of student progress. In addition, students who used the tutor to revise drafts of their essays, rather than simply receiving feedback, benefited most from the program. The general style errors of students who revised drafts moved from about the 40th percentile level of ability to the 70th percentile level after the students used the tutor. This is where you can see language facility really explodes. Recall that general style errors are primarily focused on the student’s ability to write clear prose.
Students who used the tutor to revise drafts moved from the 63rd percentile to nearly the 80th percentile in producing mostly hard sentences, which is even better than students who simply received feedback. It was interesting to observe the positive classroom peer pressure, as the students’ classmates often counseled each other to use the tool correctly and revealed to their classmates the importance of taking computerized feedback seriously. However, the benefits to student work product may extend beyond pure language mechanics and into larger implications for the education system. Automated critique and scoring may offer an improvement to the feedback provided by harried college professors. Automated scoring can be immediate, as mentioned, and consistent, along with feedback on student areas of need. Additionally, systems can respond at a significant student’s level of English language proficiency and can be used to enhance student learning and meet student writing needs, regardless of the classroom teacher’s particular bias, grading criteria, and ability to help.
One advantage of essay tutoring in the online setting is that students must rely on their own resources rather than simply following a process that someone else initiates. Nonetheless, some important considerations and potential drawbacks of the online setting are identified. Factors that may complicate the provision of effective online essay tutoring are discussed with strategies for mitigating each. Each suggestion is grounded in the literary analyses, personal observations and experiences, class evaluations, and self-critical analysis employed in each session in the online classroom platform, and many can be implemented quickly and cost-effectively by changing the approach to student feedback on writing and making students aware of the nature and goals of tutoring.
Many of the challenges around writing essay feedback, and tutoring in general, are not unique to the online classroom. Educators interested in increasing their effectiveness should address these tasks whether they seek online implementation or prefer the interpersonal interactions often associated with face-to-face tutoring. Prominent problems around grading essays include a lack of clear assignment guidelines, misalignments with learning objectives, reliance on single drafts without instruction, and the indifference of students with strong writing skills for tutoring.
Based on the discussion thus far, it should be apparent that many of the limitations of online essay tutors result from the lack of personal dialogue between teacher and student, particularly when such dialogue is focused on the act of writing. As mentioned previously, these limitations can be lessened through the use of additional strategies that bring students back into the traditional classroom model.
For example, telecourses transform what was once a paper-only correspondence exchange in the world of distance education into a visual and aural teaching and learning channel. The actors in this channel interact with each other much as they would in a traditional ‘give-and-take’ environment. In telecourses, audio, graphic presentation, and teacher-moderated interactions combine to provide a method that is inexpensive, engaging, and taxonomically complete. It is a method whose main limitation is that the component of asynchronous written exchange between student and instructor is compressed into a relatively short period of time given the nature of the telecourse’s more traditional classroom-based delivery structure.
To some extent, students can generate similar enhancements in their writing skills through other techniques designed to ‘humanize’ online instruction. Although these options will not by themselves substitute for the benefits of a writing coach housed in the same building, city, or even state, they can create opportunities for students and teachers to communicate as they would in a traditional classroom. These opportunities provide chances for brief, practical, and flexible reinforcement of writing skills, opportunities that are routinely used to great effect in traditional instructional settings. In short, if online students perceive that their virtual teacher has a human persona, the pitfalls of quasi-independent study can be avoided.
The results of our study show that large grants allowing the purchase of paid essay tutoring services not only fail to impact student writing achievement, as measured by state-administered end-of-year writing assessments, but also serve to widen achievement gaps among traditionally underserved populations. This finding is particularly alarming in light of recent evidence suggesting that performance on these high-stakes state tests has real-world consequences for students, including longer-term learning gains. That no differences are observed in grammar, topic development, and reading between treatment and control students’ writing aid the robustness of our negative results is reinforced by our subgroup analysis by commonly tutored student writing priorities students may have from submission of their essays to online tutors.
Given the size of our sample, co-investigators partner school’s investment made at the middle school grade level, and the high per-student cost associated with purchasing paid services from popular essay tutors, our study is one of the most rigorous tests of the average effect of such services on students’ writing purposefully designed to encourage the use of writing as a form of self-reflection, exploration, expression, and a tool to communicate. Our heterogeneity analysis shows that treatment is estimated to have negative effects on every student gender, race, college, or college-targeted school and initial essay score except for those whose grade 7 test scores barely missed the cutoff, leaving only 18 percent of treatment students compared to 23 percent of control students scoring below standard. Together, our results do not support claims that access to essay tutoring improves student writing. Rather, they suggest that overreliance on commercial resources in isolation can exacerbate achievement disparities created by hybrid instruction. Further, access may have reduced student engagement in the writing process and weakened some aspect of essay writing performance.
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