[Project?] Writing Assessment Utility for Writer

[smocypj]

Dear OOo community:

Before I ask my question, here's some critical background: I teach at a small school for children and teenagers with learning disabilities, and over the summer, I'm doing my best to push the tech crew that supports our school to update the available technology so we can take a giant step or three out of the stone age.

How far behind is this school, you ask?

Well, half of what this school uses on a daily basis runs off of DOS.

Yeah, you read that right. DOS.

Nearly all the machines we have in the building are capable of switching over to Windows, thankfully, but since all the machines have been donated to the school over the years, the school's network is literally a Frankenstein barely cobbled together with three different versions of Windows: '98, 2000, and XP. Needless to say, teaching in this environment is a nightmare's nightmare since anything that anyone does on one computer is never 100% guaranteed to work any other computer in the building.

With this impossible-to-make-up scenario, my research has lead me to think that OpenOffice just might be what the doctor ordered. I've only started to tinker around with Writer tonight and it seems like the perfect replacement for the school's Word '97 (*gag*), but I'm dying to know more about how to manipulate Writer to better fit the school's needs.

Bearing all of that in mind, I've sought out help for tweaking the spellchecker on Writer in the Beginner's forum here (http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... 99#p145599)

On this advanced projects forum, though, I have a much bigger puzzle to pose:
A major tool this school uses to assess the progress these students make in their ability to write independently throughout the year is a program created by the founder/former headmaster/resident tech guru called "CritiWriter." Writing teachers such as myself at this school will carefully read through a student's paper, take note of how many prewriting and how many editing strategies Student X used to create said paper, and then we will evaluate Student X's paper based on its content, its grammar, and its spelling accuracy.

Next, we use that data to determine the paper's holistic scoring. At this point, we have the following scores to write down:
1) Holistic score for organization (i.e. depth of content and structure of overall paper)
2) Holistic score for style (i.e. sentence fluency, voice, etc.)
3) Total # of grammatical errors
4) Total # of spelling errors
5) Total # of paragraphs (we count this only because CritiWriter nearly always gets this wrong because it'll interpret a "Dear ____:" line as a separate paragraph)
6) Total # of writing strategies Student X used (out of 14 possible)
7) Total holistic score (on half-year papers only -- this score is based off of #1, #2, and certain IEP-related objectives)

Finally, we take all of those scores and punch 'em into the CritiWriter utility, which then provides us with all of the following data:

a) Total # of words
b) Total # of "mature words" (as determined by checking against a list of certain words the school has compiled in a database of some kind over the years)
c) Total # of sentences
d) Total # of sentences per paragraph
e) Total # of paragraphs
f) Words per error (in other words, how many words was the student able to type in a row WITHOUT making ANY error whatsoever?)
g) Grade-level equivalents for all of the above data points

Considering all of this, you can imagine why it takes a writing teacher like myself an eternity to grade through just ONE paper at this school. It's a tremendous amount of work and is all very time-consuming, but the plus side is that all of this hard data gives us a near-crystal clear picture of how well Student X is doing in each of these particular areas of writing.

SO...
My question is, does anyone out there have any idea how I can design or find a utility like this "CritiWriter" to function as part of OpenOffice's Writer?
As I mentioned earlier, "CritiWriter" runs off of DOS...and as I'm sure you all know, it's not 1981 anymore. If I could design or find a utility like this to work with Writer, it would be nothing short of a revolution for this school. If there is no such existing utility out there, but someone reading this is interested in collaborating to make it happen over the summer, count me in.

Thank you for your help!
J

[TheGurkha]

Does this look like it might help: Readability Report.

(You might want to note, in my experience really long posts like yours are a turn off for a lot of forum users - they just don't read them. Cutting right to the chase is usually better at getting to a wider audience.)

[smocypj]

Thanks -- I'll look into it, although since the school's way of assessing is so particular, it may not fit the bill as is. I just wish I knew how to code or whatever to get something like this to work the way I need it to.

And thanks for the feedback as well. Maybe I'll try again and link it to this if anyone wants to know the nitty-gritty.

[Taolin]

Dear Ghurkha,
Thanks for the link to the Readability add-on. It would be a help for my work, but I note that it seems to be only available for Windows. Have you any information about a similar thing for Linux installs?

[keme]

There are probably several different routes to a workable solution. I don't know exactly how CritiWriter works (e.g. how it connects with the documents, and how results are stored). That said, I can see two main paths:

You may be able to run your CritiWriter software in Linux, using a DOS emulator (DosBox may be suitable). If that's a viable option, your needs for a supplemental "assessment utility" would be an extended notes/markup tool to classify text elements and properties according to your (or CritiWriter's) criteria, so the final scores can be "dumped" on CritiWriter. (Since you asked for "Readability report" for Linux, I assume that you envision all teaching computers running Linux.)

If you need a complete rewrite of CritiWriter, that's a much larger project. You need to know the details of the current workings in order to get it right ("Scratching the surface" of this task, you'll need such things as point scoring for each writing error/achievement, and for the holistic score, weighing of the different assessment areas against each other).