Education Commons^™

Writing Assessment In Early Primary Classrooms: Thoughts From Four Teachers, Elle Mariano, Glenda Campbell-Evans, Janet Hunter

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

It is important that teachers are conscious of and reflect upon their views of writing in order to support students to achieve writing outcomes. This study examined teacher views about which aspects of writing they considered most important in years one and two and explored how these views came to be formed. Four West Australian teachers participated in semi-structured interviews, during which they carried out a think-aloud process, voicing their thoughts as they examined, commented on, and evaluated young students’ writing samples. These data provided insights into their reasoning as they assessed children’s writing in years one and two. Findings …

“Does It Have To Be A Real Story?” A Social Semiotic Assessment Of An Emergent Writer, Ted Kesler

Publications and Research

Standardized writing assessments based in linear progressions position teachers for deficit views of young children’s emergent writing development. Consequently, the researcher videorecorded a writing assessment of his son, Daniel, at age 5 years, 4 months, as he composed a story across pages of a blank book, using an assortment of writing tools. Data sources included the transcription of the writing session and Daniel’s final product. The researcher first used open coding then coding based in systemic functional linguistics. Based in ecological and social semiotic perspectives, the researcher shows how Daniel’s writing development was expressed interpersonally, with the emerging text functioning …

Developing And Examining Validity Evidence For The Writing Rubric To Inform Teacher Educators (Write), Tracey S. Hodges, Katherine Landau Wright, Stefanie A. Wind, Sharon D. Matthews, Wendi K. Zimmer, Erin Mctigue

Literacy, Language, and Culture Faculty Publications and Presentations

Assessment is an under-researched challenge of writing development, instruction, and teacher preparation. One reason for the lack of research on writing assessment in teacher preparation is that writing achievement is multi-faceted and difficult to measure consistently. Additionally, research has reported that teacher educators and preservice teaches may have limited assessment literacy knowledge. In previous studies, researchers have struggled to provide strong evidence of validity, reliability, and fairness across raters, writing samples, and rubric items. In the present study, we fill several gaps in the research literature by developing a rubric, the Writing Rubric to Inform Teacher Educators (WRITE), which utilizes …

Fast And Fruitful: Effective Writing Assessment For Determining The Success Of New Initiatives, Eileen K. Camfield

University Writing Programs Staff Articles and Papers

Many writing program administrators experience a familiar conundrum: heed the cries for fast assessment results or engage in the lengthy and complicated process that meaningful review of student learning seems to entail? Such was my plight in the 2013–2014 academic year when my university deployed a new strategy for supporting incoming developmental writers. Beginning that fall, students whose writing-SAT (SAT-W) scores were between 450 and 500 were enrolled in a course known as Seminar Plus Studio (SPS), an interdisciplinary class that included a weekly supplemental 100-minute studio aimed at delivering targeted writing instruction, practice, and feedback. Instructors for these sections …

Computer-Supported Peer Review In A Law School Context, Kevin D. Ashley, Ilya Goldin

Articles

Legal instructors have been urged to incorporate peer reviewing into law school courses as a way to provide students much needed feedback. Peer review can benefit legal education, but only if law school instructors adopt peer review on a large scale, and for that, computer-supported peer review systems are crucial. These web-based systems orchestrate the mechanics of students submitting written assignments on-line and distributing them to other students for anonymous review, making it considerably easier for instructors to manage.

Beyond the problem of orchestrating mechanics, however, a deeper obstacle to widespread acceptance of peer review in legal education is the …

Exploring Writing Of English Language Learners In Middle School: A Mixed Methods Study, Robin L. Danzak

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

The study's purpose was to assess, through mixed methods, written linguistic features of 20 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in middle school. Students came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Participants wrote two expository and two narrative formal texts, each in Spanish and English, for a total of eight writing samples each. Additionally, students developed 10 journal entries in their language of choice, and 6 randomly selected, focal participants were interviewed for the qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis involved scoring formal texts at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Scores were analyzed using Friedman's 2-way ANOVA by ranks, …