MyWritingWeb is a unique, Web-based application that integrates the monitoring of student growth in writing ability with writing activities targeted to each student’s Lexile writer measure.

MyWritingWeb is designed to enhance writing ability, convention knowledge and keyboarding fluency. The activities were created using proven instructional design principles for developing writing ability:

1) immersion of students in professionally authored text
2) automatic scoring
3) immediate feedback
4) instruction tailored to each student’s unique profile of strengths and areas in need of improvement

Using MyWritingWeb

Growth in writer ability is monitored by providing students in grades 2–12 with multiple opportunities (at least once per week) to respond to prompts written to a wide range of topics, including mathematics, science and social studies. The responses are scored one of two ways: first, the Lexile Writing Analyzer, an automatic essay scoring engine, estimates a student’s writing ability by evaluating the words used and how those words are combined into sentences; second, the student and teacher can evaluate the quality of the response using state-specific scoring rubrics. This feedback helps the student write better first drafts in the future.>

With MyWritingWeb, each student receives targeted practice designed to improve convention knowledge. Based on his or her Lexile writer measure, a student chooses from a wide range of topical passages that contain four types of convention errors: capitalization, grammar, punctuation and spelling. Each passage was originally composed with no errors by a professional author. The errors were introduced by qualified editors so that the student can recreate the professionally authored text. Students have three opportunities to correct the text for each of the error types. Each passage contains 10–20 errors.

Convention knowledge is monitored the first time a student interacts with a passage. Errors not corrected on the first interaction are identified for the student on the second attempt. On the third attempt, the student receives direct instruction on the error and how to correct it. In this activity, the student engages with professionally authored text throughout a unique instructional cycle of practice, scoring, feedback and direct instruction. Each cycle consumes about 7–10 minutes of individualized activities and direct instruction.

Keyboarding fluency, or the ability to type on a keyboard with accuracy, increasingly is becoming an important 21st century skill. MyWritingWeb provides students with multiple opportunities to take keyboarding tests to monitor the number of words they are able to type per minute and the accuracy in which text targeted to their writing ability is typed. Performance on the keyboarding test and the Lexile writer measure are combined to provide each student with typing activities. The keyboarding game adapts to real-time performance as the student plays the game.

MyWritingWeb in the Classroom

MyWritingWeb shows much promise in providing students with activities designed to enhance their writing abilities. The application currently is being used by tens of thousands of students in grades 2–12. For example, during the 2008-09 school year, about 1,000 MyWritingWeb users in one district spent more than 209,000 minutes writing responses to over 10,000 prompts and attempted to correct more than 518,000 convention errors contained in over 30,000 passages (i.e., paragraph edits), with a total of 69 percent correct. Another group of 800 students completed 3,487 typing tests, typing, on average, 20 words per minute with 49 percent accuracy.

The Reading-Writing Connection

A student’s writing ability typically is 350L lower than his or her reading ability. Interpreted within the context of The Lexile Framework for Reading, students write where they have 95-percent comprehension. Thus, students should work on activities designed to improve convention ability where their expected comprehension rate is high and the reading demands are low enough so that the cognitive demands can be devoted to writing.

The Lexile Framework for Writing and MyWritingWeb show promise for helping to improve writer ability, convention knowledge and keyboarding fluency. An important feature of MyWritingWeb is its ability to integrate automatic scoring of these key abilities while promoting writing across the curriculum.

For more information,call 1–888–LEXILES or email mywritingweb@Lexile.com.