Quality vs. Quantity: Finding the sweet spot with writing assistance tools

How many of you have rolled your eyes when your admin announces a new #EdTech tool that they want you to implement in your classroom?

We’ve all felt that big push to use a certain new program or tool, especially if the district just bought it, and especially this year with so much digital learning. But, how do we as teachers weigh the balance of use vs. abuse?

When is a buzzword just a buzzword and when do you let the bandwagon drive past you?

It has been especially hard to find that balance this school year with the constant shift in schedules and the temptation to rely on digital tools when instruction was online. There was definitely some technology fatigue as students were forced to learn how to manage the various links, websites, and apps that they needed in order to complete assignments this year. When we came back in person, some students would opt to take notes on paper or sigh in relief when I passed out whiteboards for an activity instead of giving them a link to an assignment.

We know from the law of diminishing returns (this takes me back to my high school economics class, thanks Mr. McCarthy!) that eventually, the more you use something, there is a point where you no longer get increased value from it. From my experience using Grammarly, I found that the quality-quantity tradeoff looked different throughout the year as we changed our learning model to accommodate Covid-19.

This year, the quality-quantity trade-off looked something like this:

In this case, I am defining quantity as how much time students spent using Grammarly, and quality as how I observed it being beneficial to students:

• Remote: higher quantity, lower quality
• Hybrid: medium quantity, higher quality
• Full: lower quantity, medium quality

This experience has seemed to confirm what I had suspected at the beginning: writing assistance tools are beneficial, but not at the cost that it completely takes over learning. But what is the point at which the benefit starts to plateau? And how do we recognize that, especially if it is different for each student?

Confronting the plateau in the quality-quantity trade-off

I think the answer is that we teach students how to recognize their own plateau. This is no easy task. We must teach students to be reflective of their own learning, to the point where they are willing to accept that they need to challenge themselves and avoid taking the “easy” way out.

Instead of clicking through the red lines that pop up in their writing, perhaps we teach them to analyze what mistake keeps coming up for them. Instead of cleaning up their writing based on what Grammarly marks up, perhaps we have them identify areas that need revision and then ask questions about how to make it better. Instead of just sending students online, perhaps we encourage students to decide when they need a writing conference with a teacher versus when they feel good about writing independently using the tool to help them.

We also need to recognize our own plateau. We know that students are more likely to be excited about what they’re learning if their teacher is excited about it. If we, as teachers, are able to recognize where our own burnout threshold is with technology, perhaps we can maintain the enthusiasm for writing revision that we want our students to cultivate.