As Elevate has grown as a company, one of our primary objectives has been to keep the company up to date and as close to the cutting edge as possible with the latest developments in pedagogy and education technology. To this end, we have been making a series of investments in leading EdTech start-ups, quickly becoming one of the largest EdTech investors in Europe. In Disrupting the Classroom, we profile these investments and what they mean to Elevate and our mission of Helping the Kids.
Ecree
Essay writing is one of the most important skills that students learn at school. However, it is also one of the hardest skills to master. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in the US found that 75% of Year 8 and Year 12 students lacked essay writing proficiency, whilst 40% of students who undertook the ACT writing exam were judged as lacking the writing skills to successfully complete a college education. The question is: why is learning to how to write essays so hard?
There are 3 key reasons:
Most teachers lack the time to work one-on-one with students and learning to write essays is time intensive. Most teachers will take the time to give their class an introduction to essay writing basics: how to structure an essay, how to structure a paragraph, and so on. But putting those instructions to use is difficult. Once you have put them to use, students need to get feedback from the teacher as to what they are doing right, what they are doing wrong, and how to make the necessary corrections. Furthermore, each student in the class will have a different level of proficiency. To effectively help students, a teacher needs to spend at least five minutes with each student across numerous classes. No teacher has the time to provide such high levels of individual support and, as a result, most students are left to their own devices.
Essay writing is a skill built through repetition. Most students aren’t going to get it right the first time. Students need to complete a large volume of essays, have these essays marked with detailed feedback, and be provided with guidance on making next steps so that they can continue to iterate their essay writing skills. Again, few teachers have the time to mark such a large volume of essays, nor provide detailed feedback.
Many teachers don’t feel comfortable teaching essay writing, having had little formal training or experience themselves. A study by the University of Michigan and the Arizona State University found that fewer than 50% of teachers had taken a course at university that spent significant time teaching essay writing. As a result, only 1 in 2 teachers stated that they felt comfortable teaching this skill.
These are systematic problems that severely hinder both the teaching of, and development of, good essay writing skills.
Enter Ecree. Ecree is founded by Jamey Heit, a Professor in Linguistics, who set out to address the problems his own students faced in essay writing. Partnering with Robin Donaldson (a PhD in computer science), the two have developed a rules-based, AI platform that automates the teaching of essay writing and the marking of student essays.
Here is how it works:
Teachers upload an essay question to the platform along with a basic marking rubric
Students then write their essays within the platform. As students are writing, the AI identifies the quality of what they have just written and provides feedback for how it may be improved. For example, a student may write a topic sentence to a paragraph. As they are writing it highlights the sentence in one of 3 colours: green (high quality, no changes necessary), orange (ok with some changes needed) and red (poor, significant changes needed). More importantly, it provides direct feedback as to why this evaluation has been given and what a student needs to do to improve the topic sentence. Students can then immediately use the feedback to change the topic sentence and watch as the colour changes accordingly. This immediate, detailed, and personalised feedback, partnered with the process of trial and error, provides a very fast learning curve for students, helping them to quickly make changes and improve.
This has been so effective that 95% of students using Ecree at university in the US have improved their marks, with the average student increasing their marks by a whole letter grade. It has also increased the average amount of time that students receive essay writing coaching by 10 hours a year, saving teachers literally hundreds of hours.
Why is Elevate Involved
Elevate is involved as we are looking to directly incorporate the Ecree platform into a number of our products, including teacher resource kits for Note-taking and Essay Booster seminars. This represents the first step in Elevate digitizing and gamifying its post-seminar resources. We believe this will increase the amount of time students spend applying the skills post-seminar and making post-seminar implementation easier for teachers.
Further information