DATA AND ASSESSMENT 1

Teresa Chavez
EPS 513
February 14, 2014


Data and Assessment
Intervention Study: Balanced Paragraphs

This quarter we have been focusing on small group instruction and intervention.
My question for this paper had to do with intervention and assessments. I wanted to know
how I can drive my intervention instruction further using data. How can I use data to
inform my small intervention group instruction so that I can accurately gage student
content knowledge and skills.
For this particular lesson, students learned how to write balanced body paragraphs
for their papers on the Westward Expansion that contained both author ideas and me
ideas. Author Ideas are sentences that a student pulls out of the text, they are very
similar to quotes but students do not necessarily quote from the text. These statements
have to begin with an introductory sentence stem that lets the reader know these ideas are
taken out of the text. Normally, students use sentence stems such as according to the
author, in the text it states, and an example from the text is. Me Ideas are
statements a student makes on his or her own. These statements come from the students
themselves and have to contribute to the author ideas and main ideas. Me Ideas are
tricky because they have multiple components, missing one component of a Me Idea

DATA AND ASSESSMENT 2
will make it incorrect. Me Ideas also begin with certain sentence stems we want to get
students used to using. These sentence stems often begin with in my opinion, this
makes me think, and this makes me wonder. The lesson itself was taught how mini
lessons are normally taught. The Writing Do Now or Hook was designed to get
students engaged in the lesson coming up. I had students read a short informative
passage about Mount Rushmore. Students had to pull something interesting from the text
and write two me ideas. Students received a half sheet paper with the passage and had
the sentence stems for author ideas and me ideas at the bottom. Students had to read the
passage and complete the sentence stems. The Do Now, Mini Lesson and Exit Slips all
align and have the same objective. I believe this format of assessments for the objective
of the day is extremely important. I dont think the do nows and exit slips would be as
effective if they did not align completely with the Mini Lesson. I honestly dont think
there are many weakness to the way my mentor and I (I teach exactly the way my mentor
does, or at least I try to[following routines and procedures the way she does]) teach
lessons because all of the assessments are so closely aligned. Perhaps the only weakness
is that we show and evaluate material based on one way. There are many different ways
to evaluate and assess balanced paragraphs but we deliver the content in one way and
assess in that one way as well. It would benefit students to see how to write balanced
paragraphs in multiple ways. Students also know that what they are practicing during
the Do Now will be enforced in the Mini Lesson and will be revisited during the Exit
Slip. We gather data for the Do Now and the Exit Slip, but for this paper I will only
focus on the Exit Slip and Intervention data. The Data we gathered from the Do Now and

DATA AND ASSESSMENT 3
Exit Slip reflected what we saw in the Mini Lesson. Since writing is a little different
from reading, Do Nows and Exit Slips were used as practice more than anything.
Students followed the same format of Do Nows and Exit Slips for about 3 weeks; the
entire time students had to research, draft, publish and present their writing. Students
practice writing Tuesdays and Thursdays. The interim assessment manifests itself as the
final research paper students produce. This research paper has to be balanced with
Author Ideas and Me Ideas. There is other criteria such as content and grammar but
we are especially looking to see if students can produce balanced work. The presentation
itself also has different criteria, criteria students themselves have to evaluate each other
on.
Originally I thought that I would use the data that I gained from Exit Slips to create
two small intervention groups but after seeing the data, it was clear that I would instead
have to create three small groups in order to facilitate intervention. The data showed one
of three things. Students did not know how to produce Author Idea sentences, students
could not produce Me Idea sentences, or students could not produce either. Only one
student showed that they were not able to produce both Me Ideas or Author Ideas.
Students had more difficulty producing Me Ideas than Author Ideas. More than three
times as many students could not produce Me Ideas over Author Ideas. This meant
that I would have to address three small groups, one small intervention group would go
over Author Ideas, and I would break up students that did not produce Me Ideas into
two groups.


DATA AND ASSESSMENT 4

Author Idea Me Idea
Student 1 x x
Student 2 x x
Student 3 x

Student 4 x

Student 5 x x
Student 6 x x
Student 7 x x
Student 8 x

Student 9 x

Student 10 x x
Student 11

x
Student 12 x x
Student 13 x

Student 14 x x
Student 15 x

Student 16 x x
Student 17 x

Student 18 x

Student 19 x x
Student 20 x x
Student 21 x

Student 22

x
Student 23 x x
Student 24 x

Student 25 x x
Student 26

Student 27 x x

DATA AND ASSESSMENT 5

Like I mentioned earlier, Me Ideas have many components to them. Students have to
align content in Me Ideas to their Author Ideas and they have to be clear using
specific sentence stems. The intervention was a lot of monitoring on my part and
discussing with students what balanced paragraphs look like. The practice they had to do
in the intervention was aligned with their exit slips. I made sure to keep the passages less
rigorous so that I could see if students could practice the skills without getting confused
with the text. Once I explained to students what good balanced writing looks like they
were all able to produce their respective skills. We also worked on editing and
correcting. Students were able to work with each other by adding to or correcting their
Author Ideas and Me Ideas. I pulled student the following Tuesday and Thursday to
make sure they were still understanding how to write in a balanced way. Students are
actually presenting their published research papers this week. I will be able to review and
compare the data to see if students were able to master the skills I taught and went over
during intervention, independently. Whole class, I feel students were able to work
independently using a graphic organizer paragraph frame I created to help them map out
their thinking. Students have an anchor chart that explains the order of a balanced
paragraph, and what each sentence looks like. Students also have anchor charts taped to
their desks that list different Author Ideas and Me Ideas sentence stems. Students
have a solid system of support in the classroom they can always refer to. The student that
was not able to produce Author Ideas or Me Ideas became comfortable with Author
Ideas but still needed guided practice with Me Ideas. He was confused because we

DATA AND ASSESSMENT 6
had taught students to use questions to engage readers. Another problem this student
faces is that he is often absent so it becomes difficult to keep up since he is already
behind. Intervention helped him, I wonder if the reason why he caught onto Author
Ideas so quickly was because he was in a group of 3 instead of a group of 5 or 6.
Specialized and one on one intervention always seems to help students reach academic
success.
I connected the most with the Heritage article because it really focused on the
progression students go through when learning a new skill or content. Heritage says
formative assessment is a systematic process to continuously gather evidence about
learning. For some reason I assumed Me Ideas were going to be easier for students to
come up with than Author Ideas because I figured that it would be easier for students to
come up with their own ideas rather than taking something out of the text. The formative
assessments I gave (Do Nows and Exit Slips) proved that students almost immediately
mastered Author Ideas but struggled with Me Ideas. I thought long and hard about
this and realized Me Ideas were actually higher on Blooms Taxonomy and required
deeper thinking and interpretation. It was important to be able to break up the
information I gathered so I could effectively inform my small group intervention. In
small group intervention I had students share their writing with each other and they had
to either add onto or correct each others work. I found this to be extremely beneficial for
students because once they were able to articulate what balanced writing looked like they
were actually able to produce it better themselves. This also allowed them to reflect
about their own writing. Heritage speaks to the idea of student giving each other

DATA AND ASSESSMENT 7
feedback, students [can] learn to give constructive feedback to their peers that can
provide for future growth. After seeing the modules, one video in particular, in which
students were taught to analyze student work and develop their own criteria about writing
gave me many ideas as to how I could have improved this lesson. Seeing how well
students were able to give each other feedback in small groups made me think that we
could have tried this whole group. I decided to have students evaluate each other during
their presentations and saw how engaged they were the first day. If students are able to
identify what good papers look like they will have an easier time trying to produce them.
The video showed students engaged in the writing process and how they were able to
point out what good writing looked like. This is a very powerful technique, one that
could possibly fill gaps students have about writing.
After facilitating small group intervention I found it difficult to start a discussion
among students. I wonder what questions I can ask to keep the discussion moving
forward and how I can actually assess conversations student are having. Students learn
best when they are modeling and discussing skills with other students, what are effective
discourse strategies I can use in small groups?