Technology improves undergraduate sentence-level writing skills

Graduating university seniors are often found to lack proficient writing skills. This places a heavy financial burden on employers and puts job-seeking new graduates at risk. Capstone students at a medium-sized western public university in the USA were studied to assess whether a technology-based writing tutorial and assessment tool developed by the capstone instructor would result in an increase in sentence-level writing proficiency. The research question that is investigated in the study is, "does the technology-based, sentence-level writing tutorial and assessment environment result in superior student writing skills when compared to the paper-based writing improvement methods?". A quasi-experiment was performed to investigate this question. It was found that the technology-based tutorial and assessment environment improved student writing over that of control group methods. The results of this study suggest that the use of such a treatment that was developed using an open-source learning management system platform can be effective in improving sentence-level writing skills that students have difficulty mastering throughout college.