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Re: [school-discuss] English teacher apps



I should clarify that my response is to automated scoring sub-thread
that's recently evolved, since it doesn't make much sense in the
context of grammar exercises. I got a little confused because
apparently the histogram refers to the exercises rather than the
sub-thread. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

 - Jason Lai

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 05:49:18 -0700, Jason Lai <jason.lai@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 18:27:41 -0700, Dennis Daniels <ddaniels@magic.fr> wrote:
> >
> >  > Quite possibly. There are many things that teachers still do better than
> >  > computers. A computer might be a good replacement for a bad teacher, but
> >  > it is rarely even close to a good one.
> >
> > Yes, I agree, however, but the good teachers can be made great by
> > applying the tools that help the teachers better analyze an entire
> > group's needs. I'm looking for apps that help remove the drudgery of
> > pointing out that ending a sentence with a preposition is bad form, that
> > one must start a sentence with a capital letter and if you make a
> > spelling mistake it is the student's responsibility to correct it.
> 
> A more general application of that would be an open-source
> grammar/style checker. Microsoft Word has a grammar checker that also
> looks at things like academic word usage -- although unfortunately
> it's also rather unreliable.
> 
> I believe Abiword was trying to integrate the Link Grammar system as a
> grammar-checking tool, and Link Grammar recently adopted a more
> liberal license. It won't handle style issues like awkward wording,
> word misuse, or academic style, since it's more of a rule-based
> tagging system, but I think those could be handled separately.
> 
> However, as a student, I don't like the idea of any sort of automated
> grading. Or even just when teachers assign points based on how many
> times you use certain words that they're looking for. My writing
> teacher pointed out that it's easy to throw around a bunch of terms
> without really understanding what they mean. You could imagine a
> situation where a student says that a person had a "profit motive" and
> gets more points than a student that clearly shows that he/she knows
> what it means, but fails to use the appropriate "target vocab".
> 
> But that's an extreme example. Good word lists might state that
> "consequently " is a good supporting word and "evidently" is weak, and
> bring that to the teacher's and student's attention for learning
> purposes -- not used for grading. I would be very wary of using word
> lists specific to a particular topic for the reason listed above and
> the fact that students will probably come up with a wide range of
> arguments that the teacher may not have thought of.
> 
> I don't like the idea of a histogram, because that tends to lean
> towards grading/evaluation and says nothing about the specific context
> in which the words are used. I'd rather see a circle around
> "evidently" with a comment like "'evidently' is not a good word choice
> because it suggests to the reader that you did not expect the findings
> of the study (...)" -- thanks to my writing teacher for that example,
> although I know I'm not describing it very well here. I'll see the
> note, fix it in my rough draft, and hopefully not make that mistake
> again. If I get back my final draft and it just says that I got docked
> X points for having lousy style, that's not going to teach me
> anything.
> 
> Even if the teacher points out all the errors on the final copy, I
> probably won't care anymore -- so the rough draft is the best place to
> point such things out. And even if the teacher warned me that
> "evidently" was not a good word choice, the final draft should still
> be graded by the teacher on the basis of how strong the argument
> really is, not because some people think that "evidently" is a poor
> word choice.
> 
> Hope that made some sense -- I'm not a good writer myself :P
> 
>  - Jason Lai, first-year college student
>