A significant proportion of post-16 learners arrive at college with a low level of literacy (L1 or lower). And after what may have been difficult experiences at school, they do not generally have much motivation to improve their own writing skills. Consequently, the work that is submitted for their vocational qualification is often poorly written and can be difficult for assessors to award higher level grades to.
The goal of the Marco project is to create a sustainable mobile platform that can provide motivation for learners to improve their spelling and grammar skills, and lead to a behavioural change by encouraging them to checking and proofread their work.
Learners will access Marco independently and use it to check the spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPAG) elements on their written work. This work can be submitted directly in the app by linking Marco to their Google Drive.
By addressing this problem, we hope to see learners will have an improved level of literacy and, in time, see that reflected in their vocational grades too. During this initial stage of building and testing, the team intends to recruit about 100 learners, building to 1000 as it approaches general release into app stores in 2021.