It is important to set a purpose for writing just as you do for reading. Students need purpose and direction. Best Practices in Writing Instruction states,
“In a world where student achievement if often gauged by the application of a pencil to a multiple-choice bubble, it is important to remember that writing is a performance task that requires substantial effort, motivation, persistence, strategic planning, and skill as well as knowledge about the topic.”
Our students live in a world full of testing. As the book states, most testing is in the form of coloring in a circle for scan tron, multiple-choice questions. Student can get by on those types of assessments without putting much effort in. Writing assessments are very different. The product is important, but so is the process students use to get to the final product. Assessments should assess both of these pieces of the writing process. To begin the writing process you need a clear purpose and audience. The audience needs to be one students can relate to and write with a purpose. When my second graders were working on persuasive writing, I made their audience their parents. This is an audience in which the students know how to get their attention. The purpose for writing was to persuade their parents to change their bedtime to a later time. The students of course loved writing about this were very interested in this topic.
Writing can be incorporated in all parts of the curriculum. Writing can help you assess students not only in the writing process, but also in other subject areas. It takes time for students to be able to clearly express their thoughts and ideas about content in their writing. The writing process should be taught as a lesson in itself before it is used to communicate information. Students need to understand the process in order to use it as a tool of successful communication. All students are different, some may write a piece that is well-organized and grammatically correct but does not include the correct information while another student could write a poorly organized piece with all of the correct information. It takes time to develop a well-organized writing piece for communication. Teachers should use writing assessments to guide their writing instruction while testing is used to assess the actual writing. There is stress placed on students in testing situations. They have a limited time and receive no assistance. Students need practice in these situations because they will encounter them both in and out of school. Students need practice being put in these situations so they know how to approach them. Much prep time in classrooms is spent not only on content prep for New York State Assessments, but also on how to take the test. This is especially important for Special Education students. State tests put so many writing demands on students that it will help put them at ease if they have a plan of how to take the test.
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