Quill.org Helps More Than One Million Students and is Awarded Grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
December 21st, 2018, New York, NY — Over the past five years, Quill.org’s free online literacy tools have enabled more than one million students to improve their writing skills. To date, Quill students have written and received feedback on more than 150 million sentences.
Quill.org is a nonprofit educational technology startup dedicated to helping low-income students become great writers. Approximately 27 million students in the U.S. struggle with basic writing, one of the most important skills young people need to graduate high school, enroll and succeed in college, and advance their careers. Quill is building free, open source tools to widely disseminate time-tested and research-validated writing strategies that support and enhance critical thinking.
In recognition of Quill’s efforts to promote student success through a research-based intervention, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has awarded Quill a grant of $450,000 to fund the development of new tools that take innovative approaches to assessing student progress and providing feedback. In education, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s mission is to ensure every young person enters adulthood with the skills and abilities they need to reach their full potential, and that every teacher is equipped with the tools and research they need to help get students there.
“We want to help every student become a great writer, and we are looking forward to using advances in technology and evidence on how students learn best and to build powerful new tools that can help many more students,” says Executive Director Peter Gault.
Quill’s instructional model employs research-based strategies from Writing Next, a report published by the Carnegie Corporation that details the most effective techniques for developing writing skills. Quill is now working with Dr. Steve Graham, the author of the report, to develop powerful new writing tools focused on logical reasoning and critical thinking. Students will use reasoning words (such as “although,” “because,” and “consequently”) to connect ideas together, provide evidence to support claims, and develop thesis statements. Quill’s tools will then automatically grade and provide instant, targeted feedback for students, enabling them to revise their work and develop their writing skills.
Quill has been previously supported by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Heckscher Foundation, The AT&T Foundation, and Google.org, among others. These organizations have enabled Quill.org to distribute 100% of its content for free to every student and teacher. Over the next two years, the organization aims to scale its impact to help 4.5 million students improve their writing skills.
