Assessing Student Writing

Lots of teachers struggle with assessing their students writing and writing techniques.  Grading writing assignments can be so subjective.  Thank goodness for writing rubrics and guidelines!  Otherwise, teachers may have drastically different views on grade level appropriate writing.  Lots of students struggle with starting their writing.  However there are often no guidelines or rubrics that students can use to get them started.

Give them a Writing Prompt

Just like teachers need resources to get them started in teaching, students need resources to get them started on their work.  I created a writing prompts series meant to help spark a student’s creativity in writing.  The writing prompts are great for independent free writing but also meant for teachers to use when assessing a students writing.

There are 3 versions of this resource.  Each version includes over 100 writing prompts with a space at the bottom to track written words per minute.  Also included are several different types of data tracking sheets for both teacher tracking and student tracking.  It is very important to ensure that teachers monitor the progress of student writing.  They can do so by maintaining a consistent data collection system (such as the data tracking sheets in this product).

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Writing Prompt Categories

Each version of this product has different categories of writing topics such as:

*What if’s?                                                                                                       

*My Favorites

*Scenarios

*Holidays

Opinions/Argumentative topics such as:

*Would you rather…?

*Should we?

*Do you think…?

 

Using the Writing Prompts for Assessment

To use these writing prompts as assessments, follow these directions:

• Frequency: Every 2 weeks or Every Month
• Give the student a writing prompt page.
• Allow the student 1 minute to think of what they want to write, on that topic.
• Then give students 3 minutes to write as much as they can on that topic.
• Track the students’ words per minute by using a teacher tracking sheet or allowing the students to chart their own success on a student tracking sheet.
• By the end of the year you can compare the collected data and determine each student’s progress.

These writing prompts and assessments are great for Special Education, Resource, Response to Intervention, and General Education.

Need more resources for assessing Reading, Writing, and Math Skills? Click HERE!