Chp. 10 Make Assessment Count

"There is lots of writing assessment going on these days, but little of it actually improves the quality of students' writing," p. 238, was such a powerful sentence to start out this chapter, it made me want to read on.

Here are a few things I have highlighted in this chapter that I either agree with or am going to try in my classroom:

p.239-"Looking at students' writing over time, for purposeful communication to real audiences, is far more valid."

"Placing students on a writing continuum has the potential to be helpful or a waster of time, based on teachers' knowledge." We are still trying to decide if the continuum we use is beneficial. I believe that it would be more beneficial to implement the suggestion found on p. 249, which is to take a sample of writing from each student at the beginning and end of every school year, with the same prompt. Wouldn't this be cool to see the growth over time? I believe that the students and teachers would both learn much more from that than we do from the continuum.

p.243-"It is not advisable to apply rubrics to all writing nor to score all writing." Thank you, Regie! This is an area where we have had discussion on as well, so I think we will feel a little more at ease and be able to focus more on creating good writers. Tom Newkirk's wise thought was quite appropriate, "It's not what the writing has- it's what the writing does."

p. 247- I thought the idea on helping the students visualize the reader/rater/scorer was excellent too, especially for those grades that are giving state writing assessments.

p. 250-It is nice to showcase a collection of student work to show improvement over time for individual students, but the idea on this page was to showcase longitudinal displays for Pre-K- 3rd gr. in our bldg. That would be such a fun display to be enjoyed by all.

p.252- Grading was addressed on this page, which stated 80% of student writing shouldn't be graded and that we need to do more with informal assessments and self-evaluations. I do believe that self-evaluation is a wonderful piece of assessing writing, but for some reason I haven't had my 3rd gr. students do this even though I had done this previously when I taught 6th graders. One more thing that I want to try with my class before the end of the year and then continue this at least once every 9 wks. in a school year.