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Study Concludes That Tutorial Software Improves Writing Skills By 12.91%


In a September 2001-April 2002 study of fourth graders in New Jersey's Middletown Township School District, student writing samples were compared between a group of control classes and a class that used Merit Software's Writing Fitness software and Renaissance Learning's Perfect Copy.

Students using Writing Fitness and Perfect Copy outperformed the control group by 12.91%. They showed an average 21.5% gain on prompts taken from the New Jersey Elementary School Proficiency Test (ESPA) Writing Rubric.

To ensure statistically valid results, the test class and the control classes were balanced for cognitive abilities, gender, and ethnicity. Teachers jointly graded students' writing samples.

The study concluded, "It appears that continuing to have students work with tutorial software such as Renaissance Learning's Perfect Copy and Merit Software's Writing Fitness for long periods of time may assist in improving student achievement."

Writing Fitness is an easy-to-use grammar improvement Windows program that helps students improve their writing skills and provides teachers with measurable results. The program helps students recognize common problems in writing, including run-on sentences, comma faults, sentence fragments, and misplaced or dangling modifiers.

To read the entire study, visit http://www.meritsoftware.com/tutorial_software_writing_study.pdf.

ABOUT MERIT SOFTWARE:

Since 1983, Merit Software (www.meritsoftware.com) has been producing educational software that addresses the core competencies that students require to succeed. The emphasis is on strengthening students' ability to read, analyze data and communicate their ideas.

Merit Software's programs are known throughout the industry for providing context-sensitive tutorials for students and convenient record management features to aid teachers, tutors and parents.

Visit www.meritsoftware.com to examine the company's library of educational applications currently being used in thousands of educational facilities worldwide.

Merit's educational software has been the subject of rigorous, independent, scientific-based research. These studies have concluded that Merit's software provides an effective supplement to everyday instruction. Research findings are available on www.meritsoftware.com/research.

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