Technology improves undergraduate sentence-level writing skills
by Patsy Tinsley McGill; Murray R. Millson
International Journal of Learning Technology (IJLT), Vol. 10, No. 2, 2015

Abstract: Graduating university seniors are often found to lack proficient writing skills. This places a heavy financial burden on employers and puts job-seeking new graduates at risk. Capstone students at a medium-sized western public university in the USA were studied to assess whether a technology-based writing tutorial and assessment tool developed by the capstone instructor would result in an increase in sentence-level writing proficiency. The research question that is investigated in the study is, "does the technology-based, sentence-level writing tutorial and assessment environment result in superior student writing skills when compared to the paper-based writing improvement methods?". A quasi-experiment was performed to investigate this question. It was found that the technology-based tutorial and assessment environment improved student writing over that of control group methods. The results of this study suggest that the use of such a treatment that was developed using an open-source learning management system platform can be effective in improving sentence-level writing skills that students have difficulty mastering throughout college.

Online publication date: Sat, 18-Jul-2015

The full text of this article is only available to individual subscribers or to users at subscribing institutions.

 
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.

Pay per view:
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.

Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Learning Technology (IJLT):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:

Username:        Password:          Forgotten your password?

Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.

If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com