Evaluating Children's Writing

A Handbook of Grading Choices for Classroom Teachers

Suzanne Bratcher, Linda Ryan, (With) Linda Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135627355
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Evaluating Children's Writing: A Handbook of Grading Choices for Classroom Teachers, Second Edition introduces and explains a wide range of specific evaluation strategies used by classroom teachers to arrive at grades and gives explicit instructions for implementing them. Samples of student writing accompany the instructions to illustrate the techniques, and an appendix of additional student writing is provided to allow readers to practice particular evaluation strategies.

More than just a catalog of grading options, however, this is a handbook with a point of view. Its purpose is to help teachers become intentional about their grading practices. Along with recipes for grading techniques, it offers a philosophy of evaluating student writing that encourages teachers to put grading into a communication context and to make choices among the many options available by determining the instructional purpose of the assignment and considering the advantages and disadvantages of particular grading strategies. Specific grading techniques are integrated with suggestions about the craft of evaluation--guidelines for instructional objectives, for student audience analysis, and for teacher self-analysis that help define communication contexts.

New in the Second Edition:
*a new chapter on state standards and assessments;
*a reorganization of the chapter on approaches to grading;
*additions to the chapter on management systems;
*additions to the chapter on teaching yourself to grade;
*additions to the annotated bibliography; and
*updated references throughout the text.

PART I
The Objectives of Evaluation

Part I explores grading as an act of communication between teacher and students. First, our feelings about grading set the stage for this instructional communication. Second, the many different instructional settings in which we find ourselves drive the decisions we make about how to teach our students. Third, the pieces of the grading puzzle (context, content, structure, mechanics, and process) provide a wide variety of purposes for the writing assignments we make. The theme of this part is that evaluation should serve instruction, not vice versa.

CHAPTER 1 In the Background: How We Feel about Grading

CHAPTER 2 Specific Situations: Putting Evaluation into a Context

Student Audience Considerations

Instructional Purposes of Grading

Teacher Stance toward Grading

CHAPTER 3 The Pieces of the Grading Puzzle

Context

Definition

Grade-level Applications and Examples

Content

Definition

Grade-level Applications and Examples

Structure

Definition

Grade-level Applications and Examples

Mechanics

Definition

Grade-level Applications and Examples

Process

Definition

Applications and Examples

CHAPTER 1
In the Background
How We Feel about Grading

Just after Christmas I was walking down the hall in a K–6 elementary school. On the stairway I encountered a friend, a fourth grade teacher.

I said, “Hi, Ellen [not her real name, of course]. How are you today?”

She groaned. “It’s almost report card time! Do you really need to ask?”

I shrugged with what I hoped was the appropriate amount of sympathy.

“You know,” she went on in an agonized voice, “I don’t know why I leave grading papers till the last minute.” She looked at me as if I might be able to enlighten her.

I shrugged sympathetically again.

“It’s just that I feel so guilty about grading,” she rushed on. “I know grades are important,” she added defensively. “I know parents and kids need to know how they’re doing, but.…” Her voice trailed off.

“Yes,…” I began.

“It’s just that I work so hard to build a relationship of encouragement and trust with my children in their writing.” Her tone was plaintive, the grieving tone of an adult when a favorite dog has died. “And then suddenly I have to become judge and jury.” She looked off down the empty hall and spoke more to herself than to me. “Almost every one of my kids tries hard at writing. I just hate to discourage the late bloomers, the slow little turtles who will likely win the race one day.”

She turned and looked at me, as if suddenly remembering my presence. “You know what I mean?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes,…” I said, ready to offer my heartfelt condolences. But she had turned down the hall toward her room.

I stood watching her go, her question echoing in my ears: “Why do I leave my grading to the last minute?” Why indeed?

As teachers of writing, we all know exactly how Ellen was feeling that day. We struggle with the dichotomy of teacher versus grader whenever we take up student writing, not just when report cards are due to go home. In fact, we often wind up feeling positively schizophrenic. As Ellen said, we work hard to earn our students’ trust as we try to help them improve their writing. We instinctively know the truth of Lynn Holaday’s (1997) assertion that writing students need coaches, not judges (p. 35).

But we must grade student writing.

A review of recent books on the subject of teaching writing emphasizes the schizophrenia we feel when we stare at a stack of papers, grade book open. Most of the literature rejects even the word “grading.” Instead writers use words like “assessing,” “evaluating,” “responding.” We read the books, and we agree. But most schools still demand grades. Stephen Tchudi (1997) summed up the conflict in an introduction to the report of the NCTE Committee on Alternatives to Grading Student Writing: “The committee is convinced by the research… that grading writing doesn’t contribute much to learning to write and is in conflict with the new paradigms for writing instruction. As a committee we would unanimously love to see grades disappear from education altogether so that teachers and students can focus on authentic assessment, but we realize in the current educational climate, that’s not likely to happen” (p. xii).

No wonder Ellen puts off grading her students’ writing. She enjoys reading what they have written. It’s easy to respond, to reply to what her students have said, even to make suggestions for future writing. It’s not so easy to put a grade on the paper, to reduce the comments she has made to a “B,” to a “+,” or to an “S.” She, like the NCTE Committee, would love to see grades disappear. She feels like Lucy Calkins’ (1994) colleague Shirley McPhillips, “. . . you stare at the report card and it looks so foreign and you think, ‘How can I convert all that we’re doing into those little squares?’ You try but you feel like a traitor, like you are betraying something… and the whole thing becomes so distasteful” (p. 312). Furthermore, when Ellen turns to educational theory for help, she finds a variety of terms used in discussions of evaluating children’s writing—assessment, grading, evaluating, responding. Sometimes the terms seem interchangeable; at other times they seem to mean something individual. In an attempt to clear up this confusion, Tchudi (1997) arranges these terms according to the amount of freedom each provides teachers. Response to student writing, he explains, offers teachers the most freedom because it grows directly out of the teacher’s reaction as a reader and is often based on an emotional reaction to the text.Assessment offers less freedom for the teacher because it focuses on practical concerns about how a piece of writing is succeeding (p. xiv).> Evaluation is even more focused because it compares a piece of writing to some sort of benchmark or criterion. Grading, says Tchudi, provides teachers with very little freedom because it condenses so much information into a single symbol that communication about writing is virtually lost (p. xv).

So, we understand Ellen’s frustration. She wants more freedom to respond to her students’ writing. She wants to deemphasize grading. She talks to her students about writing as a process, a process of getting better. She has explained that the individual grade is not important; progress is the important thing. She has told parents the same things on Back-to-School Night. Still, she watches Billy wad up his paper angrily and throw it in the trash can after she returns it. She knows it’s the “C” he resents, possibly because his classmates have told him that a “C” is “terrible,” possibly because his father does not pay him for “Cs.” In any case, he is responding to the grade, not to her written comment—”I wish I could visit your grandma’s farm”—at the end of the paper. And she knows that Sally, a little girl who sits next to Billy, never takes her papers home at all. Ellen realizes that these students would respond differently if she’d put only the comments on the papers. Anna, the best writer in the class, the student who always receives “As,” writes at the end of the year exactly like she did the first week of school. So Ellen finds herself putting off grading until the last minute. She reads her students’ writing eagerly and enjoys writing responses to what they’ve written, but she is reluctant to put grades on the papers. She enjoys telling Billy she likes his descriptions of his dog and wants to know more about the day he got it, but she finds herself avoiding the label of a grade. She wants to help Billy feel good about his writing; she doesn’t want to discourage him with a grade. Ellen’s distress over grading has become so severe that sometimes she takes her students’ papers home and leaves them there until she is forced to put grades on them—when she faces a stack of new papers to grade or a blank report card that must be filled in.

Many of us feel as Ellen does. In the struggle to change teaching practices over the last twenty years, we have begun to see writing differently, to see our students differently. We have lived through and been part of the paradigm shift Maxine Hairston (1982) described. We no longer emphasize the products of writing to the exclusion of the process. We no longer assign writing in isolation.

We take students through prewriting activities to build background and to help them learn to think through what they know and what they need to find out in order to write thoughtful prose. We help them visualize different audiences and different purposes. We take our students through drafting to help them separate composing from editing, ideas from surface considerations. We walk students through revising to help them understand that writing is fluid, not fixed, that it can always be improved, that other people participate in writing with us. We work with students on editing to help them become proficient at the conventions of writing. We suggest strategies for helping each other with the surface correctness requirements of written language. We provide publishing opportunities. We celebrate the product of all the hard work that has gone before. We take up the papers. We read them and feel good about the writing our students have done.

And then we must grade those papers.

Parents, principals, school boards, school psychologists—all demand that we grade student writing. The grades we give communicate to these outside audiences in a wide assortment of contexts, some of which we never imagine until we’re faced with unexpected conflict. Parents, for example, sometimes interpret the grades we give our students in the context of the instruction they received as children, principals in the context of grading patterns that emerge from year to year, school psychologists in the context of an individual student’s accumulating record, school boards in the context of entire districts.… On and on it goes: different audiences with different purposes for the grades we are required to put on our students’ papers.

We sit, then, with the stack of papers in front of us, aware of this startling variety of audiences and purposes, but most keenly aware of our primary audi-ence—our students—and our primary purpose—teaching.

Most of our students have taken us at our word. They have participated in prewriting, in drafting, in revising, in editing: they have followed the process. And yet there are differences in what they have been able to produce. As teachers we know that writing is not exact, that we are not striving for perfection either in our own writing or in our students’ writing. As graders “A+” represents the perfect paper—the one that is error free. Teacher/grader schi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I: The Objectives of Evaluation
• Part II: Evaluation Options
• Part III: Using Grading as a Teaching Tool
• Appendix A: Sample Papers
• Appendix B: Annotated Bibliography
• Appendix C: State Scoring Guides