SALEM, Ore. -- Beginning with the new school year, a spell-check option will be available as part of the Oregon Department of Education's online writing assessment software, the agency announced last week.

Earlier this summer, ODE staff met with school district representatives for an in-depth discussion about the pros and cons of enabling this feature.

Prior to this year, the spell-check feature was disabled for the online writing assessment.

Issues discussed included the increasing use of computers with spell checkers for communication in the workplace, college, postsecondary training, and the military.

Also discussed were the effect of such a change on the conventions score and how to provide equity for students using the paper-based test.

Based on this discussion and input from ODE staff, the following changes to the statewide writing assessment will be implemented for grades 7 and high school:

1. The spell-check feature in the online writing application will be activated for use as an allowable resource for the 2010-2011 Oregon Statewide Writing Assessment.

2. Students taking the paper-based administration will be allowed to enter entire lines of text into a word processing application that has an enabled spell-check feature; if students are generating their full essay on a word processor, the automatic spell-check can remain enabled throughout the writing process.

The test asks students to write an essay in response to a prompt. Their writing is judged on six traits, including organization and sentence fluency. Conventions -- which includes spelling, capitalization and similar features which spell check can detect and fix -- is the single most important element in a student's score, with conventions score counted for twice as much as any other trait.