I was skeptical when I saw the H5P Essay Tool. I’m very leery of essay assignments that are only assigned to evaluate content. There is a tremendous amount of student labour involved in essay writing, and students have a lot of anxiety about the form. To evaluate a specialized form of discourse only for content doesn’t really set students up for success, and it also invites faculty to disregard essay instruction. (Bow, as we do, at the altar of “coverage.”) Ok, so I have some issues.
So the Essay Tool earned a skeptical raised eyebrow from me. To have the tool give feedback on something as complex as an essay with mere key terms seems a bit of a fool’s errand to me. When I feel immediately dismissive of something, however, that’s when I know I need to think a little more critically about it. The question emerged for me: what kind of long-form writing assignment is well-served by this kind of formative evaluation?
I landed on summary assignments. We teach summary as a key skill in most Academic Writing courses, but students also need to master summary writing skills in order to succeed in lots of science and social science courses where abstract and précis writing are common assignments; students who master summary writing skills are also well-placed to succeed in their reading assignments across the disciplines. It might be useful to have a module for students that allows them to practice summary writing, using the key term feedback to ensure that students have understood the central argument of the assigned text; the “Solution” offered then doesn’t need to be a one-size-fits-all answer, but instead can lead them through what we typically refer to as the “stages of thought” they ought to have identified in the source article.
I think this would be an interesting supplemental module in courses where instructors expect students to understand the conventions of summary / abstract / précis writing, perhaps.
