Pearson has unveiled hundreds  of additions to the reading and essay-writing capabilities of  WriteToLearn, the company's complete online tool for building reading-comprehension and writing skills for  academic success.

With WriteToLearn, students practice essay writing and  summarization skills, and their efforts are measured by Pearson's  state Knowledge Analysis Technologies (KAT) engine. The  KAT Engine is an automated assessment technology that evaluates  the meaning of text, not just grammatical correctness or spelling.

With this update, WriteToLearn now features nearly 200  new reading passages in science from Pearson's Scott Foresman  Science for grades 4, 5, and 6, growing its library to nearly 800 engaging reading passages from subjects across the curriculum.  Students read these passages online and then summarize them using the  online writing tool. They receive immediate feedback from  WriteToLearn, detailing the steps they can take to improve their  writing. A "scoreboard" shows students their progress as they work to  move into the "excellent" zone. For struggling readers and English  Language Learners, WriteToLearn provides text-to-speech capabilities  with added dictionary and spot word translation so they can listen to  the reading passages before writing their summaries.

More than 125 new essay topics relevant to contemporary  classrooms have also been added to WriteToLearn, so teachers can  choose from a larger library of prompts when assigning essays  to their students. For essays, WriteToLearn provides feedback on six  traits of writing - ideas, organization, conventions,  sentence fluency, word choice, and voice - and allows students and  teachers to focus on each of these important dimensions of writing.

In addition to choosing from a library of essay  topics that come with WriteToLearn, teachers can create their own  topics to assign to their students. To expand teachers' capabilities  for providing students with meaningful feedback to improve their  writing, WriteToLearn now features enhanced student feedback on  teacher-created prompts. This enhanced feedback gives students  additional, targeted guidance for revising future drafts of their  essays.

All schools and districts with current WriteToLearn  accounts will receive the updates free of charge. More information  about WriteToLearn is available at www.WriteToLearn.net.

Source: Pearson, www.pearson.com