How can we effectively assess student writing? Should we grade upon effort, completion, standards, achievement, or improvement? Is our primary task to respond or to grade?
Here’s my take. We should grade based upon how well students have met our instructional objectives. Because each writer is at a different place, we begin at that place and evaluate the degree to which the student has learned and applied that learning, in terms of effort and achievement. But, our primary task is informed response based upon effective assessment. That’s how to grade writing.
For example, here may be an effective procedure for a writing task as it winds its way through the Writing Process: Read more…
Grammar/Mechanics, Spelling/Vocabulary, Writing
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Phyllis Shlaffly’s July 21 article, posted in the Eagle Forum pieces together a number of undocumented sources commenting on the prospect of a national curriculum and the Common Core State Standards. Following is her article and my responses to her concerns and comments from the perspective of a public school teacher and educational publisher. Read more…
Reading, Writing
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Remember using Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition back in high school and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style back in college? Each resource provided tips on grammar, usage, mechanics, spelling, and composition. Many students found these resources to be indispensable writing partners for essays and term papers. Writing Guides, English Handbooks, and Style Manuals all provide useful tools to students and professional writers alike. However, print copies are often out of date as soon as they are published. With commonly accepted guidelines in flux, the resources of the web are much better suited to the needs of today’s writers.
Constantly updated, The Pennington Manual of Style has been designed to serve as a complete writer’s reference guide (not merely a guide to citation formatting) for fourth-twelfth grade students and their teachers… with one major improvement over the old Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition and The Elements of Style: This style manual is fully interactive with 438 downloadable essay e-comments to make essay response efficient and comprehensive. Teachers can SAVE TIME GRADING ESSAYS AND GIVE STUDENTS BETTER COMMENTS with this resource. Plus, teachers are licensed to print Read more…
Grammar/Mechanics, Spelling/Vocabulary, Writing
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Good teachers know that students need detailed, prescriptive, and personal comments on their essays throughout the writing process to make significant improvement. However, the process can be time-consuming and frustrating. It would not be unusual for a teacher to spend 15 minutes to red-mark and write comments on the rough draft of a five-paragraph essay, then repeat the process to evaluate the final draft. Even with that significant amount of time, comments would have to be concise and rely upon abbreviations and diacritical marks. The focus has to be limited to identifying what is wrong, not explaining why it is wrong. No time for examples or suggestions as to how to improve the writing. Maybe a quick positive comment. Exhausting!
Additionally, frustration mounts as the teacher has to write the same comments over and over again throughout a stack of student papers. Only to be exacerbated when, after receiving their graded essays, students simply glance at their final grades before cramming the essay into the bottom of their backpacks. There has got to be a better way… Read more…
Grammar/Mechanics, Spelling/Vocabulary, Writing
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Essay Structure Numerical Hierarchy
Conscientious teachers know that merely completing a holistic rubric and totaling the score for a grade is not effective essay response or writing assessment. Teachers may choose to grade and/or respond with essay comments after the rough draft and/or after the final draft. Using the types of comments that match the teacher’s instructional objectives is essential. Additionally, keeping in mind the key components of written discourse can balance responses between form and content. Finally, most writing instructors include closing comments to emphasize and summarize their responses.
Writing instructors classify the types of essay comments as following: corrective, directive, and facilitative responses. Read more…
Literacy Centers, Study Skills, Writing
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Ever feel like a talking stuffed animal? Pull the cord and get one of thirty pre-recorded comments: “Needs more evidence.” “Your thesis statement does not respond to the prompt.” “Subject-verb agreement problem.” Instead of talking stuffed animals, teachers use their favorite red pens. Every teacher of writing knows what I’m talking about. The common student writing errors…
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if teachers could type and save their commonly-used “canned” writing comments to automatically insert into student essays without all the bother of copying and pasting? What a time-saver this would be! It’s easily done and you have the tools you need right on your desktop or laptop in Microsoft Word®. Plus, you don’t have to be a computer programmer to get the job done. Read more…
Writing
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It’s a relatively easy task to criticize any measure of writing assessment. This is my chore in What’s Wrong with Holistic Rubrics. However, it’s a much more challenging task to advocate in favor of a specific writing measurement. That is my chore in a related article: “Analytical Rubrics.”
Let’s start with a brief definition: A holistic rubric is a criterion-referenced assessment that is often used to evaluate writing. The writing is assessed according to a set of criteria. Unlike analytic rubrics, the criteria in holistic rubrics are grouped and not separated into discreet writing tasks. Thus, multiple components are grouped by a defined category and are considered as a whole.
Holistic rubrics have two basic features: 1. the writing category 2. the numeric levels of performance.
Holistic rubrics are used to assess writing by the SAT®, ACT®, state standards tests, by many college admissions counselors, and by most teachers. If everyone is using them, they must not be that bad. Read more…
Writing
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Thought I’d share how I started using computers to grade essays and offer fellow teachers a great resource to provide better essay response and cut grading time by half. Years ago I played around with the Insert Comments feature of Microsoft Word® and learned how to put in and format the bubble comments. I started using these comments to respond to and grade student writing submitted by email. At first, I only assigned a holistic rubric score, made a few comments, and patted myself on the back for learning how to insert audio files for brief summary responses. Students loved this paperless process. Read more…
Grammar/Mechanics, Spelling/Vocabulary, Writing
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