Developed by educators, learners, researchers, and communications designers to open up new possibilities for learning and assessment that are:

Collaborative

Learners create together, giving each other feedback (and even feedback on feedback), sharing their inspirations and discoveries. Even within their knowledge communities, learners are connected through individual learner profiles.

Flexible

Learners work at their own pace, according to their own interests and capabilities, while teachers track their progress easily through multiple views and match progress directly to established learning standards.

Motivating

Learners are inspired to create through embedding sound, image, and video within their texts for digital storytelling, lab reports with recorded experiments, local oral history projects, and more. They receive immediate feedback from other learners and from a range of computer-assisted tools in time to improve their work. Learner successes are shared with classmates, parents, and other classes in a web portfolio.

Participatory

Learners can join and lead project groups, post and share files, and start and engage in discussions at the assignment- and knowledge community-levels.

Supportive

Learners have access to tools that not only help them to improve their work, but also their knowledge of the writing process and mastery of written forms, from grammar to structure to genre, within English Language Arts and across other disciplines that require extended written or multimedia reports, such as Science and Social Studies.

• lesson plans for delivery to the whole class or customized for individuals or groups to accommodate learner diversity;
• learning materials for web access by students;
• student projects, with performance tracking;
• review formats for peer review;
• annotation labels to guide self-assessment and peer comments;
• surveys, from quizzes to opinion surveys to fully-fledged selected response or constructed response tests;
• structure templates to guide students as they undertake projects;
• just-in-time feedback and formative assessment.

Teachers can share what they have created with other teachers, adopt and adapt what other teachers have created, and demonstrate student progress with data continuously collected by Scholar.

Learners become creative participants in energetic, high-performing knowledge communities, working in supportive work spaces and publishing to safe and secure portfolios.

Early results of the research and development work funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences shows that Scholar can contribute to transforming learning.

After using Scholar environment, 70% of teachers in the IES-funded 'Assess-As-You-Go' project thought their students were comfortable using peer review tools. They reported that students took peer review seriously and enjoyed receiving feedback.

Although many students were not experienced with peer review (only 51% felt very/extremely comfortable writing peer reviews for other students), after using Scholar, 43.8% of students found peer reviews to be very/extremely helpful.

Here's what Grade 8 students said about anonymous peer review:

I loved this tool. I got constructive criticism from peers, and when I read over my own story, I agreed with them!

I felt like I could help them to correct their stories.

They didn't know who I was and that made it easier, also because it helped.

We are looking for Grade 8 English Language Arts teachers to trial with their classes, for one semester, an exciting new online writing environment called 'Scholar'. We are offering a sequence of exemplary writing projects and support materials targeted to the Common Core Standards. Teachers would be welcome to use these, or they can create their own using the Scholar 'project' tools.

Research Plan

We are looking for two groups of classrooms, which, for experimental purposes, will be randomly selected. (Note: Students will need computer and internet access for at least one third of class time.)

Fig 1. Lorem Ipsum

Group	Spring Semester 2012	Fall Semester 2012
Group 1	2hr professional development introduction to Scholar Baseline writing assessment Classes use Scholar Post-intervention writing assessment	Teachers may continue to use Scholar if they wish
Group 2	Baseline writing assessment Normal Language Arts classes	2hr professional development introduction to Scholar Baseline writing assessment Classes use Scholar Post-intervention writing assessment

Get Involved

To participate in the Scholar research study, contact:
Dr. Bill Cope
College of Education, University of Illinois
Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership
billcope@illinois.edu