Essay Writing and Criterion

The 6th and 7th grade Language Arts students logged on to their user accounts at Criterion, an online writing program and responded to a prompt given to them by their teacher. The teacher can adjust the settings for the due date and the maximum number of submissions that can be made before the final evaluation. If the teacher so desires, the students can receive permission to log on to their accounts at home to continue editing their assignment.

Essay Writing and Criterion

The 7th grade Language Arts students answered a writing prompt called Thematic Essay in the online writing program, Criterion. This lesson took two class periods to complete.

Language Arts and Criterion

The 7th Grade Language Arts students have come to the lab on three occasions to write responses to teacher prompts that are loaded into Criterion, an online writing evaluation software. Sometimes students are given just the class to write and other times they are given several chances to resubmit their work for a higher score.

This is an example of the essay already evaluated by Criterion.


This is an example fo the type of feedback that Criterion can give a student or teacher. If the student follows these suggestions, he or she may raise their score.

Essay Writing, Word and Criterion

The 6th Grade students wrote an essay in Word that they later uploaded to Criterion. Criterion is a web-based software that maintains student writing portfolios and evaluates individual submissions that the students make. The Criterion software can analyze writing characteristics such as sentence structure, word choice, grammatical conventions and of course, spelling. Every middle school student has an account.

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