BOULDER, Colo. - Jan. 18, 2005 -Pearson Knowledge Technologies (PKT) today announced the launch of WriteToLearn™, a Web-based learning tool that helps students develop writing and reading comprehension skills. With WriteToLearn, students practice essay writing and summarization skills, and their efforts are measured by Pearson's state-of-the-art Knowledge Analysis Technologies™ (KAT) engine, which automatically evaluates the meaning of text by examining whole passages. Students receive immediate, specific feedback on their work, and teachers easily assess student efforts individually or as a class. WriteToLearn is based on a combination of two popular PKT products, Summary Street® and Intelligent Essay Assessor™.

"Research shows that the strongest ways to build writing and reading comprehension skills are by reading, summarizing and receiving immediate feedback," said Lynn Streeter, president, Pearson Knowledge Technologies. "By combining the simplicity of Summary Street and the depth of Intelligent Essay Assessor, WriteToLearn now offers teachers and students a complete writing skills and reading comprehension development tool."

To practice writing using WriteToLearn, teachers assign questions for students to answer. The KAT engine gives students immediate feedback on the content of their essays - specific enough so students know where they need to improve, but open-ended enough for students to teach themselves to be better writers. Students rewrite their essays several times until they earn an acceptable score, saving teachers hours of time reading multiple drafts. Unlike other automated assessment technologies, the KAT engine is the only one for written language that evaluates the meaning of text, not simply grammatical correctness, spelling or other surface elements.

To improve reading comprehension, WriteToLearn helps students enhance a skill that good readers naturally possess - the ability to summarize what they read - by offering students guided practice in writing summaries. Students type a summary of a text assigned by their teacher and receive instant feedback on how well they covered each section of the content, whether they included redundant or irrelevant information and whether they directly copied too much text without putting the material in their own words. As with the essay-writing portion of WriteToLearn, students rewrite their summaries until they achieve an acceptable score as specified by their teacher.

Teachers who have tested the writing and comprehension tools are enthusiastic about the ways they help build literacy skills and save valuable time. Meghan Foster, a seventh grade English teacher at Shadow Ridge Middle School in Thornton, Colo., noted that it helps students build writing and comprehension skills while saving her time because she didn't have to read multiple drafts of summaries.

"Kids really learn to pick out the important things in the text, and their writing scores significantly improved," she said. "The best part is that feedback is immediate, and I don't have to read 120 summaries looking for all the critical information."

An annual online subscription is required for each student using WriteToLearn at a list price of under $20 per student per school year with a 20-unit minimum order, and is available through Pearson Knowledge Technologies' reseller partners. Volume discounts are available. For more information, visit www.PearsonKT.com

About Pearson Knowledge Technologies

Pearson Knowledge Technologies is the developer of products and services based on the only automated text analysis technology that evaluates the meaning of whole passages. The company's Knowledge Analysis Technologies™ (KAT) engine immediately measures writing and content in a way that simulates a skilled human grader and encourages better subject knowledge. Pearson Knowledge Technologies' writing and reading skills products, such as WriteToLearn, Intelligent Essay Assessor and Summary Street, use the KAT engine to help improve writing, reading and comprehension skills as well as build content knowledge for education and other markets.

Pearson Knowledge Technologies is a business unit of Pearson Education, the world's leading integrated education company, which in turn is part of Pearson (NYSE: PSO) the international media company.

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Lisa Wolfe
L. Wolfe Communications
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