Successful Student Writing through Formative Assessment

Harry Grover Tuttle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781596671287
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317924371
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Use formative assessment to dramatically improve your students' writing. In Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, educator and international speaker Harry G. Tuttle shows you how to guide middle and high school students through the prewriting, writing, and revision processes using formative assessment techniques that work. This brand new set of strategies includes real writing samples plus easy-to-use applications that will allow you to monitor, diagnose, and provide continual feedback to your students. You'll help them perfect their written communication skills and ready them for further growth. Tuttle offers tips on breaking large writing assignments into several smaller tasks, identifying red flags, varying your feedback methods, and more. Enhance your instruction by assessing students at specific points throughout the writing process, and help them to become better writers as a result!

Section II

Formative Assessments Within the Writing Process

This section includes actual formative assessments for prewriting, writing, and revision stages of the writing process. These follow the formative assessment approach and assume that students continually improve through the writing process (see figure below). Although the diagnosis stage of formative assessment identifies students’ strengths and learning gaps, this section will focus on overcoming learning gaps.

Constant Improvement in Writing

A more detailed explanation of each part of the formative assessment is found in the previous chapters.

The following stages are part of each formative assessment:

♦ Topic

• Identifies a specific skill in the writing process

♦ Information

• Starts with some students’ statements that indicate a learning gap

• Explains the role of formative assessment in overcoming the learning gap

• Provides students’ analogies that clarify their understanding of the topic

♦ Monitor

• Includes a technique to monitor this skill

♦ Diagnosis

• Identifies the students’ learning strength or gap

• Identifies strategies to overcome that gap

♦ Feedback

• Provides one strategy for feedback

♦ Time to Grow

• Provides time for practice and growth

♦ Reporting Growth

• Includes one or more ways to report student growth

As you read the assessments, you may discover that some of your views about what specifically constitutes a learning strength or gap differ from the ideas in this book. If you have a concrete measure that you and your students can readily understand, please substitute it in. Please do not use a nonmeasurable tool such as “I’ll know it when I see it” or a vague tool such as “a couple of details.” When you have a definite established level of proficiency, you can determine if students need additional assistance and how you can provide strategies to raise them up in the writing.

7

Writing Process: Prewrite

The prewriting phase of the writing process lays the foundation for the other parts of the writing process (Figure 7.1). Therefore, students need to be assessed to verify that they have successfully completed all the parts of the prewriting phase. Formative assessment not only verifies the foundation but provides immediate help with any foundation problem.

Figure 7.1. The Role of Prewriting in Formative Assessment

Narrowed Topic

Information

Students’ views on narrowing down a writing topic can reveal much insight. Comments include:

♦ It is always somewhat difficult to narrow down the topic to specifics.

♦ It took effort to limit the topic to have a topic that is easy to write about.

♦ How to limit the topic the right way so you still have enough to write about is hard. (Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2. Narrowed Topic

Formative assessment is essential at this stage to guarantee that students have a focused paper. Many pupils’ papers wander aimlessly because the writers have not narrowed their topic into a manageable topic. They cannot adequately prove “war” in a few pages. For shorter essays, they have to select a limited topic that they can develop fully in a few pages. Once writers have chosen a narrowed topic, they can better determine the controlling idea for the topic. Likewise, the more concrete the topic is, the more they can focus on their supporting statements to prove it.

One student makes this analogy to explain the importance of narrowed topics: “If you put too much food in your mouth, you choke. You need to take small bites. A narrowed topic is like a small bite.” Another student compares a narrowed topic to taking a picture, “I have to look at the scene and then decide which part will be the real focus of my picture.”

Monitor

Students write down the topic and then write at least three aspects, subsets, or subparts of that topic.

They identify which subtopic they will select for their writing by placing a check mark in front of it.

Students, peers, or you verify that there are at least three narrowed topics and that one has a check in front of it.

Diagnosis

Identify the Students’ Learning Strength or Gap

If students generate at least three subtopics of the main topic, they demonstrate a learning strength for the skill of narrowing down a topic. When students have many narrowed topics, they have better choices for their writing. On the other hand, when students create less than three subtopics, they show that they have a learning gap in this skill.

Identify Strategies to Overcome That Gap

♦ To help students with this learning gap, the whole group or a small group can collectively brainstorm many different subtopics out of the bigger topic. For example, for the topic of “violence” they collectively brainstorm these ideas: TV shows, movies, guns, bullying, war, gangs, domestic, school shootings, video games, and TV news coverage. The students realize that any topic can be divided into many distinct parts.

♦ The young writers can pair up and then individually brainstorm the same topic. For example, for the topic of “driving,” Jose may identify these subparts: “permit,” “freedom,” “cost,” “safety,” “not getting a ticket,” “distractions,” “types of vehicles,” and “weather.” He has generated numerous subtopics. His partner, Selena, lists the subtopics of “being in the car,” “trips,” “colors,” electronics,” “mpg,” “space,” “parking,” and “quality of sound.” They compare their lists. They talk to each other about which subtopic they think they can write the most about.

♦ These thinkers can use a graphic organizer to write the topic and then the various narrowed topics underneath it (Figure 7.3). Usually when students see empty boxes, they try to fill in as many as possible; therefore, they think of more narrowed topics. Instead of a box, you may prefer your students to use a pie-shaped graphic that has eight spaces; the students fill in the pie slices.

Figure 7.3. Narrowed Topics

Topic: __________________________________
Narrowed topics:

♦ Visual students can create a concept bubble map in which they put the topic in the first bubble and then create new bubbles underneath the first bubble for the subtopics. They may think that a subtopic still is too general so they break it down more.

♦ Writers can play the “make it smaller” game. In pairs, one student names a topic and the partner, says, “Make it smaller.” The first student says a smaller part of the topic. If the second student thinks that the topic is still too big, he or she again says, “Make it smaller.” If the first student has given a “smaller” answer, the second students says “Tell me another small part.” This cycle continues until the first student has at least three small subtopics. Then they reverse the roles.

♦ To generate subtopics, learners can answer questions like the following: What are numerous parts of the topic? What makes up the topic? What smaller things are connected to this topic? What are the subparts of this topic? What are some major categories within this topic?

♦ When the pupils explain to a peer or you why they are selecting the smaller part of the topic from their other choices, they show their logic of going from a big topic to a smaller subtopic. Peers or you can verify the logic or may ask for some c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Other
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section I: Formative Assessment Overview
• Section II: Formative Assessments Within the Writing Process
• References