Analysis is underway at the University of Kentucky NCSeT research site of data showing how students interact with Read-Write-Gold.
Preston Lewis and his team at the University of Kentucky are investigating how students use the program Read-Write-Gold (RWG) in their reading and writing assignments. RWG adds a tool bar to windows of open computer applications allowing students to have text read aloud, access a dictionary, spell check their writing, and a variety of other functions.
Thus far data from 207 students in 10 schools across the state have been collected. These students have logged into RWG over 3000 times in the last year and records kept by their computers are now being analyzed by the researchers at Kentucky and the NCSeT staff in Oregon. The goal of this analysis is to find any correlations between the level of activity students show in using RWG and test scores and/or their disability category.
The scatter plot below shows part of this analysis. The horizontal axis is the duration of RWG work sessions in minutes, and the vertical axis is the number of interactions with the RWG word processing tools. The data show a V shaped pattern which perhaps indicates distinct sessions where students are primarily writing and others where they are primarily reading.
The next step in the analysis is to identify corrupt and misleading records.
