Writing to Learn and Learning to Write through SWoRD
The largest barrier to giving students opportunities to work on rich problems and tasks requiring a free text response is a feedback bottleneck: there are so many students and there is so little time to provide students with detailed and useful feedback. New automated feedback tools can address a number of those situations, but are not general enough to be applied in all contexts. By contrast, peer feedback is a highly flexible strategy that can be applied to essentially any task assigned to students. Whenever students are given a writing task, they can also be asked to evaluate their peers' work using rubrics and provide constructive criticism. Thus, students can receive detailed feedback on short or long writing tasks without always requiring instructor feedback. Further, students can also learn from evaluating their peer's writing. To make peer feedback a viable strategy, students need to be strongly supported in the process and held accountable for their work so they provide accurate and detailed feedback rather than short and superficial feedback (i.e. "good job" SWoRD (Scaffolded Writing and Rewriting in the Discipline) is a tool that has been iteratively improved through research (described below) to give the support students need to effectively and efficiently provide feedback on the aspects of the assignment that are important for instruction. Most saliently, it has algorithms that ensure students take the reviewing task seriously. Teachers can then assign many more rich writing based assignments than they normally would be able to without being overwhelmed by grading/feedback workload.