Measuring writing skills improvement is what Scribo does. Connecting with this level of information moves everyone past the mechanics of simple correction into a new, sustainable improvement cycle.
When Roger Federer's coach showed him data on the number of failed backhand cross-court winners, Roger practised the shot tirelessly. He went on to develop (arguably) the best cross-court backhand in the history of tennis.
Data is the Dynamic Ability to Affect an outcome. By seeing the outputs, we can adjust the inputs to get a different and hopefully better result. Data does not have to be complicated, it is more important that it is simple, available on demand and tells a story. I'm sure Roger's coach could have advised under what match conditions his backhand waivered but the storyline was simple – you need to improve your cross-court backhand.
Without data, the writing process does not have the energy source to measurably improve. To drive improvement, all students need to see the underlying improvement story. Scribo delivers and manages this data and storyline.
Every time a writing check is run by a student, Scribo measures over 50 writing markers across core elements of writing. Improvement, or lack thereof, is recorded for every student individually and across the cohort.
Reporting for students opens up the journey they took to produce their text. Every step taken becomes the real back story to the one everyone sees on the page. Writing improvement happens in a continuum, not via a test or assignment.
Teachers see the back story of every story. Scribo builds a history and profile of each student's writing and progress, converting all text into actionable data. Questions like "Where can I make the biggest difference to student skills right now?" get answered.
Students and teachers access a range of reporting options that increase the speed of response.
Gone are the days of students waiting for grading and feedback to come back.
Gone are the days of teachers stressing about feedback and grading.
Gone are the days of waiting for draft feedback to return. Students access writing reports in seconds (if they need a paper version).
Gone are the days of teachers doing more work on the texts than the students do.
Gone are the days of teachers not instantly knowing where each student needs help.
Scribo delivers opportunities for all students to improve their level of English writing, while saving teachers time in grading and correction tasks.
Scribo disrupts the traditional writing process by handing ownership and control of English writing improvement to students. Teachers have more time to be the critic and mentor.
In this context, AI is the Additional Instructor every teacher wants.
"No-one magically gets good at writing. Every writer needs critics, mentors and teachers and the more punishing they are, the better writer you become." Ernst Hemingway
Just getting the text written is 'the job' most students will tell you they stress about. Knowing how to improve, where to improve and if indeed you are getting better, has always been the job of the teacher.
This is where teacher workloads multiply by a factor. Not only must teachers correct and grade, they then must plan where and how to improve individual and cohort writing outcomes. The obvious endpoint to this discovery is to then deliver student-level improvement.
That's a lot of work for teachers, in fact way too much work. The way in which English writing learning is set up actually encourages students to sub-contract learning outcomes to their teachers. Teachers simply run out of time to help everyone with tailored support and so the story repeats in the next year of school. We continually see teachers putting more effort into writing than many of their students do. This reality is a road to burnout for teachers and a road to flame out for students who enter higher education and the workforce without the core written literacy skills they need.
'Fixing' writing takes hours and hours (years even) of attention, way more time than a quick edit session in front of a GPS (Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling) system. The world has had GPS systems for a long time, while writing skills in education decline globally. It seems that students blindly take tactical GPS advice but don't remember it for next time.
The acronym GPS extends to cars with the same conclusion. Most drivers now have a GPS. The GPS does not improve driving skills but rather creates reactive drivers, tuned to respond to all of Siri's commands. People set off not knowing where they are going, when they get there they don't know where they are and when they come back, they don't know where they have been.
