Tyburczy Nicole Tyburczy Professor Rich Writing Assessment

Generally speaking, writing assessments can be given for a variety of reasons ranging from assigning a grade, to determining effective teaching points, to measuring proficiency. According to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) website, there are five guiding principles for assessment. They are as follows: 1) Writing assessment is useful primarily as a means of improving teaching and learning. 2) Writing is by definition social. Learning to write entails learning to accomplish a range of purposes for arrange of audiences in a range of settings. 3) Any individual's writing ability is a sum of a variety of skills employed in a diversity of contexts, and individual ability fluctuates unevenly among these varieties. 4) Perceptions of writing are shaped by the methods and criteria used to assess writing. 5) Assessment programs should be solidly grounded in the latest research on learning, writing, and assessment. For the purpose of this assignment and the grade levels ranging from preschool up through third grade, the writing assessment will be defined in terms of focusing on providing appropriate instruction and assistance to students. The assessment will also gage their language proficiency through the act of writing. The goal of such writing prompts informs the teacher if students are understanding the larger picture at handare they able to use the strategies that were just taught? Presently, I am a teaching intern at an elementary school in Central New Jersey, both working and learning alongside second grade teacher, Miss XYZ. In the time

Tyburczy allotted that I have spent in the field, I have found that writing and reading are often closely taught. Miss XYZ often ties the reading unit into the writing unit, as she has her students write juxtapose the genre they are currently studying the classroom. When I mentioned that I needed to complete a writing assessment, Miss XYZ suggested and then gave me a small moment story written midyear (January) by one of her students. Rightfully so, a small moment story is a great way to assess where a student is in terms of their writing because it can easily measure so many important elements of a students authorship. Small moment stories zoom in on a particular moment in lifea student will recall a memory and then write about it. An assessment such as this one can target the use of vocabulary, demonstrate (or not) a clear sequence of events within the narrative (beginning, middle, end), reflect dialogue, and point out use (or lack) of punctuation. These are just a few language elements that teachers can choose to look at when assessing what the child has learned and is applying thus far. It is also very effective because children at these stages are very egocentricso writing about a personal experience they have had is something that is genuinely fun and exciting for most students. I analyzed a small moment story entitled My Sisters Diary and Me, by second grader, Student ABC. ABC focused her writing on retelling her experience of surreptitiously reading her sisters diary when her sister was not home. Her writing clearly exemplifies the beginning, middle, and end elements of a story. She began the story by describing a time she snuck into her sisters room; the middle of the story consisted of ABC actually reading the diary, and the story ended with ABCs sister

Tyburczy coming into the room and catching ABC reading the diary. Judging from this piece of work alone, I would say that ABC is conscious and working on a number of features to better her writing. Overall, her spelling is comprehensible and her errors make sense she occasionally switches the letters around in a word. For example she spelled the word whispered as whispred, and heard as hred. That said, I was truly impressed with ABCs fluidity of the story and her spelling proficiency. I say this because Miss XYZ had previously informed me that ABC is one of a few children in her class who does not speak English at home; and so she sometimes has difficulty with the pronunciation of words as well as difficulty with reading fluency. I will also point out that ABC uses dialogue when appropriate, to emphasize the sequence of events. With this added dialogue, she also places proper punctuation. I see this as one of her strengths, because often, adding dialogue can be a tricky concept for second gradersdeciding how much conversation to add in your story and where, does not always come easy. But perhaps ABCs strongest writing technique that is demonstrated through her small moment story is her ability to correspond her illustrations with the text she has written. When students are in the midst of searching for what it means to have authorship and discovering their own stylistics, it is essential to accentuate the idea that pictures are just as impactful as words when telling and/or writing a story. Pictures tell the reader as much of a story as plain writingwhen you can visualize what you are reading comprehension is within closer reach and there is more meaning behind the text. Having acknowledged that, ABCs illustrations bring further clarity and detail to her writing. Her pictures reiterate the text, and many of them have caption bubbles with character dialogue!

Tyburczy While ABC has several areas of strengths, I find that there is also plenty room for improvement and growthwhich I believe is always the case with writingno matter how old you are or how proficient you may be in your ability to put words onto paper and into meaning. Though she is able to structure her writing into standard format and sequentially retell events, I would encourage her to use more detail. Her sentence structure is very concise and to the point, rarely varying. For instance she wrote, I opened up to the first page and I saw her diary. My mouth was wide open when I looked in her diary. I saw every word that she wrote. Wow, was the word that I could say. From these few sentences one can tell that ABC does not yet vary her sentences in length and detail. In making this observation, I would then teach into adding description and details to her writing. I could prompt her in saying Describe how you felt when you first opened your sisters diary, or What did your sister write in her diary that made you say Wow! Additionally, I also noticed that in her story there is a lack of transition words. Thus, I believe a lesson on transitions and how they are used to bridge one idea into another would be an effective strategy to further better her writing. Having students write every day is a vital component of balanced literacy; therefore assessments are indispensible as they can provide tremendous insight to strategies that students do and do not understand and are or are not applying in their written work. Gretchen Owocki and Yetta Goodman, authors of Kidwatching, write, Children in kidwatching classrooms learn to evaluate their own writing as they work with peers and teachers. Sometimes, this occurs through the daily discussion and collaboration that happen as children write; other times, it occurs as children

Tyburczy participate in conferences with peers and teachers. Conferences ensure that focused time is devoted to identifying childrens strengths and needs (90). The idea of conferring with students and the ability for students to understand their own writingtheir strengths and what they can improve onis only possible when the teacher dedicates time to appropriately asses his/her students. When a teacher finds a teaching point that can support an individual student or a group of students, it strengthens the class as a wholebecause like our students, as teachers we are avid learnerswe learn from our students just as much as they learn from us.