Title: Technology improves undergraduate sentence-level writing skills

Authors: Patsy Tinsley McGill; Murray R. Millson

Addresses: California State University, Monterey Bay, 100 Campus Center, Seaside, CA 93955, USA ' California State University, Monterey Bay, 100 Campus Center, Seaside, CA 93955, USA

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.

Keywords: technology-based tutorials; technology-based assessment; student writing; quasi-experiment; sentence-level writing skills; undergraduate writing skills; USA; United States; capstone students; writing proficiency; e-leaning; electronic learning; online learning; Moodle.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLT.2015.070687

International Journal of Learning Technology, 2015 Vol.10 No.2, pp.151 - 169

Published online: 18 Jul 2015 *

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