Education Commons^™

Crafting A Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading, Sarah Klotz, Kristina Reardon

Journal of Response to Writing

As labor-based grading contracts gain momentum in first year writing classrooms, new kinds of response to writing take center stage. We explore how session notes composed by embedded peer tutors and students become rich tools in a writing process and create a gateway to the writing center for first-year students. By reading session notes in conversation with students’ reflective writing, we put forward three key findings: students articulate a relationship between building confidence in their writing and their willingness to seek, receive, and value feedback; students discuss how the labor required for an ‘A’ pushed them to access and learn …

Learning From Our Limits: Lessons To Hold Tight, Kara B. Douma

New Jersey English Journal

United to prioritize our humanity, we clear the plate to more comfortably make space for what matters most. Educators achieve this by focusing on priority Standards, partnering with students for content, and reframing our needs to use assessment as learning.

Building And Maintaining Sanctuary Spaces Through Face To Face Writing Assessment, Jeffrey Austin, Ann Burke, Ellen Foley, Gretchen Rumohr

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Seasoned secondary and college instructors discuss successful face-to-face assessment, especially in virtual settings. F2F assessment frees educators to co-create equitable literacy learning experiences with students, encourages agency, demystifies the grading process, develops the classroom community, and brings meaningful inquiry about writers’ own skills and practices, ultimately disrupting inequities and inequalities of traditional grading and creating “sanctuary spaces” for all writers.

Assessment Literacy: Implications For The Literacy Professional, Bobbie Kabuto, Sinead Harmey

The Language and Literacy Spectrum

This article explores how the general term of assessment literacy can be specified to the area of reading through the lens of the informal reading inventory, Qualitative Reading Inventory-5. This article will investigate the common misconceptions that teachers, who were enrolled in a graduate program to become state-certified specialized literacy professionals, had when conducting and interpreting the QRI-5. The data that will be presented is from a project that examined the theories that undergird informal reading inventories, and how teachers understood these theories. We will then include recommendations for improving assessment literacy for developing specialized literacy professionals.

Grading For Growth: Introducing New Assessment Approaches In Traditional Grading Models, Beth A. Walsh-Moorman, Katie Ours, Aubrey Deaton, Maura Mcginty-O'Hara

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

This article explores three teachers’ experiences introducing a new assessment approach in an existing school-wide, grading framework. Teachers explore how they were able to manipulate the school framework in a way that allowed (and required) students to revise and rewrite until they had achieved mastery on key writing assignments.

Assessment Of Literacy Pedagogy Using Gratitude, Glenn Auld, Andrew Eyers, Joanne O'Mara

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This paper considers aspects of a course redesign that focuses on motivating Pre-service Teachers to engage in negotiating relevant literacy teaching pedagogies in their discipline. The purpose of this article is to describe how we approached the teaching of literacy with Pre-service Teachers, in ways that valued the Pre-service Teachers’ relationships with secondary students using notes of gratitude. These notes provided the Pre-service Teachers with an opportunity to communicate in plain language to the students what they learnt from them about literacy pedagogy. The shift from the focus on the subject matter of literacy to the enactment of literacy teaching …

Gaining Access To The Language Of Science: A Research Partnership For Disciplined, Discursive Ways To Select And Assess Vocabulary Knowledge, H. Emily Hayden, Anupma Singh, Michelle Eades Baird

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

To equalize access to science learning across genders and demographic groups, access to the disciplinary language of science is one place to start. The language of science is highly challenging and specialized, and difficulties acquiring this language contribute to disparities in science achievement across diverse student groups. This study used a pre-post design to analyze effectiveness of a brief classroom science vocabulary assessment designed to assess receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge across multiple sections of one 7^th grade science teacher’s class. Vocabulary was selected and analysis conducted by an interdisciplinary research partnership including the science teacher, a literacy specialist, …

Concepts Of Online Text: Examining Online Literacy Skills Of Elementary Students, Jodi Pilgrim, Sheri Vasinda, Christie Bledsoe, Elda E. Martinez

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Reading online text presents unique challenges for elementary students as they develop and extend fundamental literacy skills to various media. Traditional assessments of concepts about print inspired the authors’ research, which applies a similar approach to address “screen handling” instead of book handling. The purpose of their ongoing research has been to develop an instrument to assess concepts related to online reading. The Concepts of Online Text (COT) assessment measures knowledge of online navigation and text features. Quantitative analysis of student performance data using the COT has the potential to provide developmental insight into elementary students’ proficiencies in conducting internet …

What Counts As Common Core Aligned? An Examination Of A Reading Program's Agreement With The Common Core State Standards, Kim Skinner, Alecia Tate, Emily France, Gina Stocks

The Journal of Balanced Literacy Research and Instruction

Passage and implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) created numerous difficulties for educational stakeholders. One such difficulty, determining the alignment of previously utilized curricula to the CCSS, forced many states, districts, and schools into purchasing “new” curricular resources marketed as “Common Core Aligned” without any available auditing process to validate the claims made by publishers. Since initial implementation of CCSS, measures for determining alignment have been developed. This study examined the alignment of a widely used reading program, Adventures Common Core (pseudonym), to the Common Core State Standards using a modified version of the Educators Evaluating the Quality …

Teaching Peer Feedback As Ethical Practice, Derek Miller, Troy Hicks, Susan Golab

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Even with weeks of building a classroom community and deliberate instructional scaffolding, students may not engage in thoughtful peer review. One teacher discovers how he must place a deep, intentional value on the feedback itself—and the writers who provided it to one another.

Towards Student Involvement In Essay Assessment, Aynur Yürekli, Evrim Üstünlüoğlu

Essays in Education

In language teaching, assessment is one of the most formidable challenges for both the students and the teachers. Especially, when the assessment of productive skills which are subjective by their nature are concerned, the "challenge" could very well turn into a "nightmare" for both parties. In order to avoid this undesired possibility, the attitude of the grader and the students towards the evaluation rubric is as vital as the rubric itself.

This study describes the standardization process of the writing rubric for the assessment of essays, which is accepted both by the graders and the learners who are subject to …