At the end of five years of high school, students are required by Québec’s education ministry (le ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur du Québec – MEES) to write a final exam. In this exam, which students must pass in order to obtain their high school diploma, students are given 3 hours and 20 minutes to write a 500-word essay (an “open letter”) using traditional manual writing. But what if they could use a computer to type their work? The MEES invited us to conduct a study to assess the impact of computer use on the essays in terms of the writing quality and process. More specifically, the following objectives were targeted: Objective 1: Measure the effects of using a spelling and grammar checker on the number and type of text errors (vocabulary, syntax, punctuation, spelling, and grammar). Objective 2: Measure the effects of using a spelling and grammar checker on text length and writing time. Objective 3: Describe students’ perceptions of specific computer writing conditions. In this study, a mixed, predominantly quantitative (quasi-experimental) approach was used to assess texts written by 300 adolescents aged 16 to 17 years in four writing conditions. Some students wrote their texts directly in Microsoft Word and using Antidote, a spelling and grammar corrector program featuring robust analysis tools and a set of interactive dictionaries and language guides. Some students were trained to use Antidote (Group A) and others used it intuitively (Group B). Students in Group C used Microsoft Word but with the spelling and grammar corrector deactivated. A fourth group (Group D) wrote their essays by hand throughout the study. The data relating to objectives 1 and 2 were treated quantitatively: descriptive statistics were performed, followed by ANOVAs to reveal differences among the four groups. The interviews were subjected to a content analysis to assess students’ perceptions of the digital tools. The main results of the quantitative analysis (numbers and types of errors; text length; writing time) and qualitative analysis (individual interviews) are presented.

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