Formative Writing Tool

The Vendor is required to provide for a formative online writing system to allow the state to provide an integrated formative writing tool in an efficient and cost-effective manner for students in 3rd through 12th grade.
- Formative assessment requirements
1. Overview
•    The system acquired under this RFP process will be used by students and teachers throughout the school year for practice in writing and to inform instruction. 
•    This system will be implemented in the 2025-2026 school year. 
•    There are approximately 50,000 students per grade level in grades 3-12. 
•    The offeror shall propose a system that is:
o    Inclusive of informative and explanatory, argumentative, and narrative formative student writing as found in the state standards for p-12 English language arts; 
o    Multi-disciplinary—accessible and usable by teachers and students in all content areas; 
o    Accessible to students, teachers, and administrators on the school, local education agency (lea), and state education agency (sea) levels; 
o    Available to all students in grades 3 through 12; and 
o    Available during the school year on a 24-hour basis, reasonable and scheduled periods of system maintenance and upgrade accepted.
2. Timeline for delivery
•    The traditional school year begins in early-august. 
•    The statewide school year begins July 1st and ends June 30th. 
•    Board anticipates that students will begin using the system by august 15, 2026. 
•    After the 2026-2027 school year, board anticipates that the system will be operational for each lea on the first day of each school year.
- Required system components
1. Immediate, automated machine scoring
•    Scores shall be reported at proficiency levels rather than an overall numeric score or percentage. 
•    The offeror shall propose machine scoring of writing using the state standards for p-12 English language arts, which include the following categories of writing:
o    Writing standard 1: argumentative
o    Writing standard 2: informative and explanatory
o    Writing standard 3: narrative
•    The offeror shall demonstrate validity, reliability, and documented quality control mechanisms of scoring processes.
•    Ability for teachers to upload and use their own classroom rubrics.
2. Prompts
•    Age and grade appropriateness 
•    Identifiable multiple levels of difficulty
•    Prompts include a variety of topics and genres, including but not limited to:
o    Argumentative writing
o    Informative writing
o    Narrative writing
o    Descriptive writing
o    Expository writing
o    Literary analysis writing
o    Business and technical writing
•    A sufficient number of prompts for practice in writing throughout the school year 
•    The ability for teachers to input prompts for their students 
•    Multi-disciplinary prompts that require integration of many content area skills and knowledge sets 
•    Ability for teachers to share prompts with other teachers in the lea 
•    Alignment to the state standards for p-12 English language arts, which include the following categories of writing:
o    Writing standard 1: argument 
o    Writing standard 2: informative and explanatory
o    Writing standard 3: narrative
3. Stimulus materials
•    Graphic organizers: multiple rich, deep graphic organizers available to students. The system shall allow teachers to upload their own graphic organizers
•    Texts (e.g., articles, excerpts from longer pieces, etc.)
•    Ability for teachers to upload their own stimulus material, both for offeror-generated and teacher-generated prompts, and that can be added by a teacher to create a rag database of sources that the AI pulls from for feedback, questions, and other materials
•    Ability to print stimulus materials
•    Infographics, maps, charts, diagrams, graphs
•    Multimedia (audio, video, PowerPoint presentations, etc.)
•    21st century texts (websites—live and archived, hypertexts, etc.)
•    The offeror will provide all copyright, licensing, and permission fees associated with all provided stimulus materials
4. Collaborative writing and peer review
•    Support real-time co-authoring by multiple students on the same document. 
•    Provide individual contribution tracking (e.g., a report of each author's edits and contributions) for group projects. 
•    Allow teachers to easily create, assign, and manage groups. 
•    Allow the teacher to define groups using criteria-based grouping based on in-platform student data (e.g., proficiency level, completion rate). 
•    Allow teachers to save and switch between different grouping configurations for one class. 
•    Facilitate a structured peer review workflow (anonymous assignment of papers, submission of feedback). 
•    Enforce the use of a custom rubric or checklist for all peer reviews.
•    Include AI assistance for evaluating the quality of peer feedback submitted by a student reviewer. 
•    Provide an automated feature to synthesize and summarize the received peer feedback for the author, helping them prioritize revisions.
•    Include a revision reflection feature where the author formally records how they plan to use and did use the received feedback.
5. Plagiarism and AI content detection
•    Built-in capabilities to detect plagiarism and identify content that may have been generated by a large language model (LLM) or AI tool (which is a growing concern for academic integrity).
6. Writing process tools
•    Built-in tools to support pre-writing (e.g., outlining, brainstorming) and revision (e.g., readability scores, sentence structure analysis). 
•    Tools that encourage a drafting process (e.g., the ability for students to submit multiple drafts and track how their writing and scores improve).