Listen to this articleEdTech company Turnitin recently received special recognition at the White House for its formative writing product Turnitin Revision Assistant. The company provides instructors with the tools to engage students in the writing process, provide personalized feedback, and assess student progress over time. Below is our recent interview with Jason Chu, Education Director at Turnitin:
Q: Turnitin’s applications are used by more than 30 million students; could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to the company?
A: Turnitin launched in 1998 when two UC Berkeley neuroscience PhD candidates developed a writing program originally designed to facilitate peer review. They applied pattern matching algorithms to identify similarity in writing which then became a way to check for plagiarized content. However, we have always recognized that teaching students how to write well and to develop original thought is the best way to get ahead of plagiarism. Consequently, Turnitin also develops resources to facilitate giving feedback in the writing process. These resources –Turnitin Feedback Studio and Turnitin Revision Assistant– make the process of giving and receiving feedback simpler, more relevant, and more effective.
Revision Assistant, acquired from Lightside Labs in 2014, generates instant feedback for students when they call for a “signal check.” Revision Assistant is being rapidly adopted throughout the U.S. and was recently integrated into the Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy to help students prepare for the writing portion of the SAT.
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Q: What advantage does Turnitin have over its competitors?
A: Our biggest advantage is trust. For 20 years, educators at 15,000 institutions have relied on Turnitin Feedback Studio, our flagship product, to save them time and support their students as they develop critical thinking skills and write original content. We deliver a service meeting diverse needs across continents for secondary and higher education, and while respecting the privacy of users and institutions.
Turnitin technology is reliable processing up to two million documents a day and yet instructors know they will receive reports in a matter of seconds. Our customers have trust in Turnitin being able to deliver the service they need while protecting privacy and academic integrity.
Q: Turnitin recently received special recognition at the White House; could you tell us something more?
A: The invitation to be part of the White House event started years earlier when Lightside Labs –the developers of Revision Assistant– received a very select grant to develop its technology and bring it to market. This grant supported products focused on assessment technology not for the end of the learning cycle when a grade or score is applied, but rather for the beginning or during the process when learning occurs. Revision Assistant matched this vision by flipping the assessment paradigm upside down. Our perspective is that if you can train an algorithm to evaluate an essay and give it a score, then it must have learned something about that essay during the evaluation process so let’s use that intelligence proactively. What the algorithm learned can be shared with the student while they are writing rather than being held until the end and only providing it in the form of a numeric score.
Revision Assistant makes the intelligence gathered into something students can immediately use to improve their writing. The Innovative Assessment Tech Jam wanted to feature products like Revision Assistant as models for other companies and education leaders to see how assessment can be more than just an end result.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into Turnitin Revision Assistant?
A: One hurdle to meaningful writing instruction is how long it takes for teacher feedback to get to the student. Revision Assistant can help with this issue because it immediately gives feedback and the feedback covers substantive qualities like focus, clarity, and analysis. Revision Assistant uses natural language processing to evaluate an essay and give 4 points of feedback — usually two positive and two constructive — highlighted at the exact sections of the text. This is called a “signal check.” Students take this feedback, then revise their paper and can call for another signal check which will give them 4 different pieces of feedback. They can do this as many times as they like. In our pilot studies, students wrote an average of 10 revisions (read about our pilot study here).
For a teacher, this is very exciting because it means students can write more papers and get assistance right while they are writing. Consider math homework, for example. It is easy to know if you did a problem right because you can see the answer. If it’s wrong, go back and rework it until you get it right. If it’s right, move on. On the other hand, for something subjective like writing, it’s impossible to definitively assign a right or wrong score. Students need feedback while writing which tends to vary widely. We know that statements that encourage and guide are the most effective but typically these can only be uttered by people.
The crux is that teachers, however much they might like, cannot be with their students all of the time nor can they assign a dozen substantive papers a semester. Revision Assistant overcomes this challenge just a little bit. Revision Assistant can never replace a teacher but it can fill the need for guided, frequent feedback; frequent because a teacher can assign lots of prompts, and frequent because a student can call for lots of signal checks to see how they are progressing. Every single iteration of their work becomes a learning opportunity, not just the final submitted essay the teacher ultimately grades.
Q: What are your plans for 2017?
A: Turnitin is adding more resources and technology tools in higher education and K12 that help students to write well and that foster development of creative and original thought. We want to have resources that support teachers and faculty in ways to spark conversations and give them freedom to engage more deeply with their students. That means these tools streamline some tasks, like Feedback Studio which lets teachers create their own feedback items and apply them to essays, or Revision Assistant which provides instant feedback on student writing. Technology and advanced algorithms like the ones we employ are amazing resources when used in a supporting role to the teaching process.
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