Press Release - August 2, 2005
$11 Million Education Grant and Vantage Learning Partnership Pay Off for California Students
Newtown, PA, August 2, 2005 - A year ago, the Los Angeles County Office of Education's California Technology Assistance Project embarked on a bold, two-year education initiative to increase technology use in the classroom, improve writing skills, and enhance home technology access for some 33,000 6th and 7th graders. Now, at the halfway mark, preliminary results show that student achievement in language arts has exceeded all expectations, thanks to partnerships with companies like Vantage Learning, the world's leading provider of online assessment tools.Vantage Learning's MY Access!TM product, a online instructional writing program, was brought in to provide online learning technology to students participating in an $11 million Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) grant awarded to the SouthEast Educational Technology Consortium (SEETC), which represents eight Los Angeles County school districts. The grant is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. An annual performance report, including achievement results for year one and program adjustments for year two, will be submitted to the California Department of Education on September 30, 2005.
MY Access! rapidly scores essays and provides immediate diagnostic feedback to engage students and motivate them to write more and improve their composition skills. It is based on Vantage Learning's IntelliMetricTM engine, which uses a rich blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and the digitization of human expertise to accurately assess a student's competency and progress in subjects ranging from reading and writing, to science and social studies. The program includes customization features that allow teachers to align assessment with their individual state rubrics, add their own writing prompts, and tailor the teaching and learning environments to the specific needs of their students. MY Access! scores are consistently accurate and more reliable than human expert scorers.
So far, results have shown that MY Access! has helped improve students' writing abilities, and provided teachers more classroom time. Students who used MY Access!, which scores student essays on a scale of 1 to 6, showed marked increases across the board. Seventh-graders in the South Whittier School District, for example, showed significant improvements, raising their average scores by more than a point after yearlong use. Similar results were seen in all of the schools, indicating that the extraordinary results are more than random chance.
Likewise, over 18,000 students in the program completed more than 175,000 MY Access! essays since last year, according to data from the SEETC. If teachers had graded all of these essays by hand, at a rate of five minutes per essay, they would have spent 14,691 hours (or 2,098 days) simply on grading. In contrast, MY Access! scored all of the essays within seconds.
"We're only halfway through this ambitious program, and students have already dramatically improved their composition and writing skills, thanks to MY Access!," says Harry Barfoot, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Vantage Learning. "The results overwhelmingly demonstrate the benefits of technology in the classroom, and Vantage Learning's role as a valued leader in the national push to improve writing skills while maximizing resources. We're proud to be part of the SEETC's successful program of bringing education and technology together."
About Vantage Learning
Vantage Learning (www.VantageLearning.com), an affiliate of Vantage Laboratories and the leading provider of online assessment and automated essay scoring, developed IntelliMetricTM to meet the needs of business, education, and government agencies needing a comprehensive Internet-based test authoring, delivery, scoring and reporting platform. IntelliMetric administers and scores responses to open-ended questions over the Internet using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology. An individual can enter a response to a question posed, submit the response, and receive an immediate score with feedback within seconds.
Eduventures has selected Vantage Learning as one of the eight most innovative educational technology companies. MY Access!, Vantage's instructional writing program that utilizes IntelliMetric essay-scoring, earned a 2003 District Administration Top 100 Award and was included in Technology and Learning Magazine's Top 10 Smart Technologies for Schools. A Codie Awards finalist three years in a row, MY Access! recently won the 2005 Codie Award in two categories, "Best Secondary Education Instructional Solution: Language Arts/English"" and "Best Instructional Solution for English Language Learners". In addition, MY Access! was awarded the 2004 Award of Excellence from Technology and Learning Magazine.
Vantage Learning provides services in all 50 states directly to end-user clients and provides services to educational leaders such as The College Board, ACT, Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB/McGraw Hill and Thomson Learning.