This review aims to close a gap in the current literature about online support for writing in secondary and higher education. Over 80 tools, ranging from Intelligent Tutoring Systems over commented templates, real-time corpus search tools and uses of phrase books, are critically being evaluated in terms of pedagogical implications.
Although today, electronic approaches to support the teaching/ learning of writing are created in many places, discussions are more technology-driven rather than pedagogical. Writing pedagogy needs to know and discuss these new developments and their applications in secondary and higher education. Previous reviews and meta-analyses (for instance, Allen Jacovina & McNamara, 2015; Stenberger-Hu & Cooper 2015) focused mainly on such approaches as Automatic Essay Scoring (AES), Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE), or Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) in general, failing to grasp the diversity of available online aids. In our review, we will discuss these and additional approaches by explicitly linking them to pedagogical practices in higher education, such as strategy instruction (Graham & Perin, 2007), extended practice (Kellogg & Raulerson, 2007), and individualised feedback (Graham, Hebert, & Harris).