Quill provides six tools to help students improve their writing, grammar, and proofreading skills. Each tool provides a different level of feedback for students. You can view student responses and the feedback they received in our various data reports.
Table of Contents
Quill Grammar
Students are provided with five attempts to revise their work for each prompt in a Quill Grammar activity. Students receive instant feedback after each attempt. If the student does not write a strong sentence, the program gives feedback and the student is allowed to improve the sentence.
Students receive the full credit of one point if they reach a correct response by the fifth attempt. If students do not reach a correct response by the fifth attempt, they will not receive any points.
Correct answer by first attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by second attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by third attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by fourth attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by fifth attempt: 1 Point
Incorrect answer by fifth attempt: 0 Points
Quill Connect
In Quill Connect, Quill's sentence combining tool, students are provided with five attempts to revise their work for each prompt in a Quill Connect activity. Students receive instant feedback after each attempt. If the student does not write a strong sentence, the program gives feedback and the student is allowed to improve the sentence.
Students receive the full credit of one point if they reach a correct response by the fifth attempt. If students do not reach a correct response by the fifth attempt, they will not receive any points.
Correct answer by first attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by second attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by third attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by fourth attempt: 1 Point
Correct answer by fifth attempt: 1 Point
Incorrect answer by fifth attempt: 0 Points
Quill Proofreader
In Quill Proofreader, students proofread a passage to find errors and make revisions. Students are given one attempt to make all of the correct revisions, and if they do not make all of the correct revisions, they will see the errors that they missed highlighted in red and the revisions that they incorrectly made highlighted in purple. Students receive the full credit of 1 point for each correct revision that they make and receive no credit of 0 points if they miss a revision or make an incorrect revision.
If students miss a revision or make an incorrect revision, they will be automatically prompted to complete a relevant follow-up Quill Grammar or Quill Connect activity that they can complete immediately or save to complete later.
Quill Diagnostic
In a Quill Diagnostic or Writing Skills Survey, students are not provided with any feedback on their responses. Since Quill Diagnostics and Writing Skills Surveys are used to gauge students' skills, they include prompts that are intentionally difficult to effectively identify students' learning needs. Rather than seeing a percentage score for a Quill Diagnostic, students see a Completed score for a Quill Diagnostic in their student dashboard. Furthermore, you will see a Completed status in both the Activity Summary and Activity Analysis reports.
After students complete a Quill Diagnostic, you can assign practice recommendation activities based on students' diagnostic performances in the Practice recommendations report.
Quill Lesson
In Quill Lessons, our small-group/whole-class instruction activities, students engage with interactive slides by responding to prompts and discussing the relevant writing skills. Students will not receive automatic feedback on their responses, but you, as the teacher, can choose to anonymously display student responses during the Quill Lesson to prompt discussion, give feedback to the response, and encourage students to revise their answers. On the last slide of the lesson, you can assign follow-up independent practice activities.
To anonymously display student responses during a Quill Lesson, check the box to the right of a student's response and click the Display Selected Answers button.
To prompt a student to revise their work during a Quill Lesson, click the Have Student Retry icon.
Quill Reading for Evidence
When students complete Quill Reading for Evidence activities, they get up to 5 rounds of feedback.
However, please note that Quill Reading for Evidence activities are not yet scored.
There are a number of reasons why we’re holding off, for now, on scoring Reading for Evidence activities:
Given that Reading for Evidence is a new tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI), its feedback will sometimes be off, and it would be unfair to penalize students for the AI’s errors.
We’re also trying to be responsive to the evidence on the impact of numerical grades versus qualitative feedback. A meta-analysis and several studies (like this one) have found that feedback in the form of grades or scores can negatively impact achievement and motivation; whereas descriptive, narrative feedback has been found to positively impact motivation, effort, and psychological well-being.
Perhaps most importantly, we want students to view these activities as sandboxes for experimenting with reading and writing, where mistakes are opportunities for learning. We also want to emphasize process over progress, the recursive process of effective writing, and the value of revision.
Please see this Support Center article for information about how Quill's data reports display student performance on Quill Reading for Evidence Activities and this Teacher Center article for more information about the status of scoring for Quill Reading for Evidence activities.
Have more questions?
Please feel free to send a message to the Quill team using the green message bubble on the bottom right corner of the screen or email us at support@quill.org.