A new study from the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences provides results for fourth-grade students on the 2012 NAEP pilot computer-based writing assessment. The study asks whether fourth graders can fully demonstrate their writing ability on a computer and what factors are related to their writing performance on said computers.
A representative sample of roughly 10,400 fourth graders from 510 public and private schools composed responses to writing tasks intended to gauge their ability to persuade or change a reader’s point of view, explain the reader’s understanding of a topic, and convey a real or imaginary experience. Students were randomly assigned two writing tasks (out of thirty-six) and were given thirty minutes to complete each one. The study also references results from a 2010 paper-based pilot writing assessment and 2011 NAEP results for eighth- and twelfth-grade computer-based writing assessments—all of which came from different groups of kids. They also present results for an analysis of fifteen tasks that were common to both the paper and computer-writing pilot.
There are five key findings. First, 68 percent of fourth graders received scores in the bottom half of the six-point scoring scale on the computer-based pilot. Second, the percentage of responses in the top two levels of the scale was higher on the computer than the paper assessment. Third, high-performers scored substantively higher on the computer than on the paper assessment. Low- and middle-performers, however, did not appear to benefit from using the computer. Fourth, the number of words produced by fourth graders was smaller on the 2012 computer pilot than on the 2010 paper pilot. Low-performers produced fewer words (sixty) than middle- and high-performers (104 and 179, respectively). Finally, having access to the Internet at home is associated with text length, use of editing tools such as spellcheck and backspace keys, and certain demographics. Specifically, the longer a student’s response, the higher a score it is likely to receive. Moreover, fourth graders were more likely to say that they preferred to write on paper if they had no access to the Internet at home; those who said that also had lower average scores.
There are many more stats in this very long paper, but the bottom line is that low-performers have less exposure to writing on the computer and produce shorter texts—so perhaps they’re simply struggling with keyboarding, which takes time away from the cognitive work of developing an essay.
Analysts don’t suggest returning to paper-and-pencil tests for little kids—for the NAEP or for high-stakes state assessments. That ship has sailed. Rather, they recommend a commonsensical solution: teach all kids—but especially low-performers—how to compose at the keyboard, including the use of common editing functions such as spellcheck. It’s a good suggestion—but it’s also rather perplexing; one would think such instruction was already commonplace in elementary schools.
SOURCE: Sheida White, Young Yee Kim, Jing Chen, and Fei Liu, "Performance of fourth-grade students in the 2012 NAEP computer-based writing pilot assessment," Nation Center for Education Statistics (October 2015).
