Assessments of Student Writing

Over the past two classes in my Language Arts class we have been working on how to assess student's writing. At the beginning of the two weeks I was not sure of anything when is came to assessing students writing work. I did not know what to look for or how to just assess writing in the first place. We were able to work in groups and help each other assess three student's writing work. One thing that I notice by glancing at the three pieces of work is that each of the students seemed to be at all different writing levels. One of the students had great handwriting and very little spelling errors, so right away I thought her piece of writing would be the best, but I was wrong.

I have learned after these two weeks that good writing should not just be catagorized as have nice handwriting and all having correct spell. Good writng goes way beyond that. Student's should vary there writing styles throughout their piece of work. they should change from declaritve, interogative and impertive. Student who write a whole story just using imperative (to give a command) writing shows me that perhaps they need alittle more work with their writing. Perhaps they are to afraid to take some risks. I would help guide this type of student so that they felt more comfortable changing up their writing style. I could give them guided help and also do a lesson on this in a classroom. Another idea would be to work with the student one-on-one orin a small group. The student with the best handwritting and no mis-spelled words had the issue of using the same type of writing style. I would have never known this before learning about assessing students writing.

Over the past few weeks i have learned a great way to assess students writing. We were given a very helpful worksheet in class that broke writing down into differnt catagories. Some of the catagories that I thought were important are as fellows: (1) Organization- Having a Beginning, Middle, and End. (2) Sequence and ideas. (3) Word Variety. (4) Elabortation and Support of Ideas. (5) Conventions. In my opinion this is a good system, becasue I was able to compare all the students and assess them using the same criteria. This way you can see the students who are doing well and the ones who need extra help and guidance.

Overall this was a very informative lesson to learn. I know that this is going to be very helpful for me in the future not only in the Tueday Experience but when I go to Student Teach as well.