Ch 6 Writing Assessment

Chapter 6 Writing assessment

What I got out of this chapter is that writing is “a personal act” where writers pick a topic, draw on their background knowledge, and conform it to their own style of writing. Another interesting point was teaching the process of writing and not concentrating on the product of writing. The process includes prewriting maybe using a graphic organizer, writing, and post writing where students share their writing with their peers. The process also involves conferencing with the teacher to talk about what process was used in writing, and also getting peer feedback.

Another point the chapter made was that writing across the curriculum allows students to write for a variety of purposes, and in the process students write to learn. This reminded me of how I used to study for exams in college. I found that I was able to retain more by writing and rewriting information I needed to remember for exams.

There is a student checklist that I would like to try for kindergarten. I think the checklist would include:
• Did you pick out a scene to draw about?
• Did you draw your story for the reader?
• Did you add details so the reader will know what your story is?
• Did you label your story using beginning sounds?

There are some really good checklists and rubrics that we can use for writing assessments. There’s the holistic scoring rubric where the paper is looked at as a whole and given one score. The primary traits, like the 6 + 1 traits, looks to see if there is evidence certain traits (idea, organization, sentence fluency), and the analytic scoring rubric where the paper is given several scores on different components of writing. The one I created is based on a holistic scoring rubric. The Process Writing Checklist is a good way to keep track of what writing process to cover in class. The chapter suggests that to find out what writing process to put in the checklist we should observe students as they write, see what is covered during conferencing, and to get a collection of student work. Figure 6.6 is a good way to see how students feel about writing, and what interests they like to write about, and figure 6.7 is a self-assessment on writing strategies. I am thinking this self-assessment would go nicely with the Talking, Drawing, Writing book for primary grades.

These are all very good points, but I have one question that keeps nagging at me for quite sometime now: what about the kindergarten students who are just about to acquire a second language? What worked for me in the past is to pick a topic (something the students will want to write about) and have students tell their story about it. I always start out by saying the topic in Yugtun, and when students want to share I make them repeat the topic first before they tell their story in their first language. Then I would translate and I have the student repeat the sentence several times before going off to draw the story. My only problem with that is students (always 1 or 2) who will copy their neighbors, or they would repeat one story each day, which I found (according to Horn and Giacobbe) is common for students who aren’t sure of their abilities.