AE #5-Writing

Student Data

My assessment inventory is focusing on E, a fifth-grade student in Nevada. E is in the

fifth grade and moved to the United States from Mexico at the end of second grade. E is a huge

fan of graphic novels and stories about friendship. In her spare time, she enjoys playing with her

friends and boxing with her dad. Academically, E has made incredible progress in learning and

understanding her newly acquired language. While she still struggles with some phonics, she is

acquiring new vocabulary and skills daily. She has shown growth of nearly a grade level in

fluency using typical benchmark assessments. I selected E to be the student I work with due to

her academic progress and tenacity. I feel that assessing her reading abilities more in depth will

help me assist her in reaching her personal goals.

Name and Purpose of Procedure:

For the writing assessment, I gave E a simple prompt: Write about something that you

love to do. With E, many of her struggles this year have been tied to generating ideas, so I was

pleased to see that she went with boxing, her biggest passion. The purpose of this assignment

was to assess E’s writing abilities and determine her writing ‘level’.

Results:

As expected, writing is an area that E struggles with. She has worked hard all year to

improve her writing abilities, and she has come a long way since August. However, she is still in

the Expanding range according to the continuum checklist. In that category, she has mastered

utilizing a title, using capital letters and periods, spells most common words correctly, and is

considering her audience. She has also begun to achieve some areas of the bridging category of
the continuum as well. Her ideas are original, she maintained consistent focus, used varied

sentences, and does her best to employ spelling strategies.

With the second continuum, I had a bit more difficulty placing her in one category. She

scored a stage 5 in purpose, 2 in audience, 5 in focus, and 3 in organization. She is a strong

writer in her ideas and purpose but lacks in targeting a specific audience in this instance. In it,

her target audience was me, but she wrote a pretty broad informative paragraph. Her purpose in

writing was to tell me all about boxing, which she deems “the best thing I have ever try before in

my whole life”. In that she was a bit disorganized, but still conveyed her purpose clearly.

Conclusion/Teaching Strategy:

With E, I would primarily focus on developing details and providing organization in

terms of writing development. While she provided a fantastic amount of details regarding her

experiences as a boxer, her piece lacks organization. To improve her writing, I would review

with her and coach her in writing purposeful paragraphs and better organizing her writing. More

specifically, I would target the following standard: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.5.2.A

Introduce a topic clearly, provide a general observation and focus, and group related information

logically; include formatting (e.g., headings), illustrations, and multimedia when useful to aiding

comprehension. In this coaching, E would have the chance to strengthen her organizational skills

and better prepare herself for middle school and beyond.

Content Drive:

This assessment was interesting and informative. While I have had E as a reader and

writer all school year, it was interesting to assess her writing through the two continuums.

Strengthening my writing instruction has been a goal for the past year (and next, if we are being

completely honest) so it was great to see additional assessment resources that aren’t limited to
the state recommended rubrics, which I find to be wordy and difficult to accurately assess

students with. The continuum checklist is something I could easily adapt and turn into a resource

for student self-reflection and assessment.

Teacher Growth:

I first want to admit: teaching writing is my biggest area of weakness. I work so

incredibly hard to be the best writing teacher I can be, but even after two years I still feel like I’m

just throwing things at my students until something sticks. The assessment still doesn’t make a

whole ton of sense to me. I mean I understand it, and I know what the things mean and how to

fix them, I just don’t get it in the way that teaching and assessing the reading component of

literacy means. However, I’m using the resources provided in the course, along with my own

research and professional reading, to boost my knowledge and understanding of what I need to

do to become a more effective teacher of writing. I know that my struggles are partially being a

new teacher, partially just a natural deficit, and partially the lack of writing instruction and

support in my current school. Those three components make a difficult job even harder, but I am

determined to overcome these challenges.

Critical Reflection:

This was a great assessment and reflection to use on E. She is a smart and talented

student with language barring her total grade level successes. In all honesty, E isn’t much further

behind than many of my students who are native English speakers. Writing is a schoolwide

weakness and while we are working to overcome it, it is hard to fill in gaps that have been 5-6

years in the making. I am excited to use this data to work with E and push her writing abilities

along before we test next week. I believe she is capable of reaching the SBAC goals she’s set for

herself.