Online Lab to Prepare Students for College Writing

November 22, 2010

The Minority Student Achievement Network is developing an interactive, on-line writing lab to help high school juniors and seniors complete school assignments and help prepare them for college level writing. Using new media technologies, the I-OWL writing lab will help students improve specific writing strategies; transfer writing skills to course work in science, social studies and language arts; and assess their skills in relation to college-level writing. The writing lab includes a range of ways to represent instructional information, including read-aloud directions, visual representations of key information, feedback and read back, and an assessment rubric. The goal is to increase students’ motivation to engage with writing tasks, scaffold their transition to the more formal composing required for conventional academic writing, and prepare them to create complex immersive texts as required by the CORE writing standards. More information is available here.