Writing and Teaching

Writing is at the heart of teaching. The communication of ideas in a well-developed, organized, and logical manner is the best assessment tool an educator has to determine student achievement. Writing is also directly tied to a student's reading level. No Child Left Behind was created to make schools accountable for student achievement through the use of standardized testing results. Schools used multiple-choice tests as assessments to show student achievement scores on these accountability standards. Educators moved away from teaching reading and writing and toward helping students perform better on standardized tests. Recently, new national standards were created. These standards, Common Core State Standards (CCSS), focused on moving away from using multiple-choice tests to implement the use of highly intensive writing assessments based upon a student’s knowledge of the informational text. These new standards tried to test a student's knowledge of content, assess writing skills, reading comprehension, and change the way in which educators evaluate students’ performance levels. Educators would have been grading multiple writing samples for each student which would consume an extensive amount of the teacher’s time outside the classroom. CCSS was not implemented but its ideas, theories, and core beliefs still exist in today’s educational philosophy of the future. Educators are burdened with additional hours of grading writing and the additional frustration of slower feedback to their students than was previously given with multiple-choice tests. Students need instant feedback in order to understand personal/present levels of achievement and to reproduce higher/revised results. ReadWriteCommunicate will be able to decrease educational data time and give students instant feedback on their writing skills and the power to take over their own learning. ReadWriteCommunicate will give instant, crucial feedback to teachers and students relating to their authentic writing samples currently being used by students given by teachers. ReadWriteCommunicate does not put extra work on the student and teacher but instead analyzes the current writing they are doing in real-time. The education world has changed and so should the way we communicate a student’s learning to parents, teachers, and administrators. ReadWriteCommunicate is an educational tool. Think of this product as a screwdriver, a socket wrench, a shovel, a plow, a pen, a pencil, etc. One cannot build an automobile without tools, but with the right tools, one can build a truck, sports car, sedan, SUV, and the list are endless of what car manufacturers can do with these tools. ReadWriteCommunicate will be able to tell teachers, parents, and administrators the exact writing level their student is on in real-time. Research has proven that reading skills are directly related to writing skills. Reading and writing skills are directly related to oral communication skills. Reading, writing, and oral communication is directly related to math skills. If a parent, teacher, administrator, and the government knew their student’s writing level and the strengths and weaknesses of this writing level they could improve the student's education in all subject areas. The student would also have a higher motivation to improve their own writing level. New research has been developed that understands if a student knows their learning level, then the student will grow their own learning, hence creating a better educational system. ReadWriteCommunicate can do all of this. Not by making the student or teacher do more work but by evaluating a student’s work on a regular basis to give an output of the student’s writing level. ReadWriteCommunicate is built to empower teachers and students to understand their writing level through all writing samples no matter the subject area, literacy is in all subjects. The tool will be used to create an informed student, better-educated educators, and a government that will be able to better implement resources where they are needed with data instead of theories.