First Assignment with PEG

To get the ball rolling with PEG I first had to provide an excel sheet with a list of my students and some basic information like grade level, etc. I was able to get this from the office. Within days I received a list of my students from PEG which provided their username and password. Everyone had the same password which made it easy for the first assignment.

I decided to use PEG as an SLO pretest to see where my students were at in their writing. This would also provide me with a baseline for each student for the year.  I used a prompt that was already provided within PEG. They have a list of prompts that they have provided or you can create your own. See Prompts page for details on prompts and what changes you can make.  I chose an expository prompt, A Free Society, and assigned it to all my students. They only have access to ones the teacher has assigned, so no confusion on what they are suppose to be doing.

The students had no problem signing into PEG and were able to navigate through the program with no problems. If they do not finish the essay they do have the option of saving progress rather than submitting. Of course, if they do not save their progress it will be lost. We did not experience any glitches or any problems with losing their work.

Because I was using this as a pre-test, I had turned off the revisions feature and only allowed for one draft to be completed. This means they did not see any revision suggestions. They also did not know the prompt before coming to class that day, and only had the fifty minute class period to work on the essay.

I teach eleventh grade English at a career technical high school. I have a wide range of students so it is a great mix to get a good feel for the program. Below are the results for the pre-test.

The program provides quite a few reports that you can look at. See Reports page. As you can see I did have a couple of students score in the highest category, 26-30, but most scored right in the middle or lower. Which meant we had room for improvement. From looking at the essays I agreed with the scores overall. I would like to raise the cap a little more and am discussing that with PEG on how to do that.

Overall, the first time out with PEG was a success and it was a great resource for the pre-test.

What is PEG Writing

PEG is a program that assists in teaching and grading essays. I emphasize assists because it is not a stand alone program that takes all responsibility away from the teacher. Let me explain, as an English teacher I assign essays to my students and instead of having them type the essay in a word document they will type their essay into PEG which will then immediately grade the student on different categories; development, organization, style, word choice, sentence structure and conventions. The student can earn a maximum of 5 points in each category making a 30 the highest score possible.

The program will show where corrections need to be made after the first draft is submitted (although a teacher can decide to not have revisions shown till the third or fourth draft or none at all). The revisions will make suggestions on spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. I will get into this in more detail in the future and show specific examples.

The program also gives a break down of each category and provides suggestions as well as lessons that would help the student in certain categories.

Overall, PEG is a great program that can help in all areas of writing and greatly help with the grading and consistency of grading. Come back and read more as I touch on the different parts of PEG and how it is working in the classroom.