Scholar

Writing workspace for student authored multimedia content & teacher progress reporting tool

Overview

Scholar is a digital writing platform that assists teachers' delivery of instruction and assessment through CCSS aligned rubrics, learning modules, structured students peer review and student performance and progress analytics. The concept came from over four years of research at the University of Illinois and was developed in partnership with Common Ground Publishing. The Scholar platform is designed to improve student literacy outcomes in the three major Common Core text types Argument, Informational/Explanatory, and Narrative. Scholar contains CCSS project rubrics for grades 4-12 as well as specialty rubrics for the Smarter Balanced Assessment for Writing.

Teachers from across multiple subjects can take advantage of the platform enabling their students to access all of their classwork in a single place from any device. A teacher can create an assignment, embedding video, images and links, and send it out to all of their students. Those students will receive a notification and can immediately begin working on that assignment. Following the rubric, students can create multiple sections to organize the different parts of their argument, including annotations. Once a draft is published, other students can review that piece of writing section by section, comparing each paragraph against the prompt and rubric for that assignment. Students can then score each section and provide additional commentary explaining why they gave that particular score. Students then use that feedback to improve their essay and, when they think it is ready, can send it to their teacher. The teacher can then view and evaluate the assignment, referencing all of the data from previous drafts and peer review. Teachers can grade and comment within the platform, enabling students to get feedback on their writing more quickly.