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SMARTHINKING Announces Opening of the Spanish Essay Center Immediate Contact: WASHINGTON, D.C. – January 15, 2005 – Starting in February, students at select SMARTHINKING client institutions will have the ability to submit their writing to an Online Spanish Essay Center and receive detailed feedback from a qualified tutor. The service is intended for students enrolled in Spanish language or Spanish literature courses who want to use the writing center as a support tool for their course. The Spanish Essay Center is an asynchronous service where students submit a draft of an essay written in Spanish, and receive criticism and feedback from an E-structor® Certified tutor. Tutors do not edit, proofread, or "fix" papers. Instead, they coach writers, providing responses that probe and encourage students to strengthen their drafts. Students access the "Spanish Essay Center" from their SMARTHINKING homepages by clicking on the Spanish Essay Center form under "Submit Your Writing." Students fill in required course and assignment information on this form, select the kinds of help they want, and then attach their papers. Students may choose to receive the tutor's response in English or Spanish, and are encouraged to add any class policies on the type of tutoring help they can receive. Students pick up their returned essays from their Inboxes on their SMARTHINKING homepage. Depending on the level of the student, tutors emphasize "higher order concerns" such as ideas, content development, focus, and organization in their responses. As appropriate, tutors also address up to three significant "lower order concerns," such as sentence structure, grammatical agreement, or punctuation. Often, tutors will model a sample correction and ask students to find and correct a similar pattern of problems throughout the essay. Additionally, for those students who previously used the Spanish Essay Center, tutors can create more contextualized responses by reviewing students’ past essay submissions. Finally, classroom professors may ask students to submit their final drafts along with their drafts critiqued by SMARTHINKING. This provides professors a longitudinal picture of students’ revisions and progress. For each document critiqued in the Spanish Essay Center, student accounts will be billed 35 minutes. For Spring 2005, submitted essays will be returned within 72 hours. For further information on tutoring principles and E-structor Certification, please contact the program director, Stephen Grimsley at sgrimsley@smarthinking.com. Over 80% of SMARTHINKING's tutors have a Master’s degree or Ph.D. in their discipline. SMARTHINKING projects that it will provide 300,000 tutoring sessions to 70,000 students in the 2004-2005 academic year. In a survey of nearly 1500 users, 93% of students said they would recommend it to a friend; 73% said that use of SMARTHINKING improved their grade; and 92% said they would use the service again. Corroborating studies conducted by multiple clients confirm that the use of SMARTHINKING’s services improves student performance. About SMARTHINKING (www.SMARTHINKING.com) SMARTHINKING, the leading provider of online tutoring to colleges and high schools, provides live, online, easy-access tutoring to students. SMARTHINKING works with schools, colleges, universities, textbook publishers and other institutions to help educators offer students outstanding academic support. SMARTHINKING’s custom solutions improve faculty support and raise student performance by connecting students to qualified assistance anytime, from any Internet connection. SMARTHINKING clients include schools, colleges, libraries, education companies, individuals, and anyone seeking to increase student achievement. SMARTHINKING currently works with over 500 school clients and businesses. To learn more, please visit www.smarthinking.com or call 888.430.7429 ext 224. |
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