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Teachers can improve students' reading comprehension, address writing weaknesses, and provide test-taking practice with multiple-choice assessments for grades 3-8. Fifteen skill sets cover focus and organization, style and composition, and conventions and mechanics.
Explores how purposeful writing instruction can be used in the high school classroom to help students build the writing skills needed to succeed in college and the business world.
Do statewide assessments really do what they are supposed to do? Through interviews with over three hundred teachers and administrators, Hillocks examines whether state writing tests in Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, New York, and Texas actually improve students' ability to express their thinking in writing. Ultimately, Hillocks argues that the majority of existing tests actually have a harmful effect on the way students are taught to write. In addition to providing analyses of assessments that do not encourage good writing, The Testing Trap contrasts them to those that do. Concluding with practical procedures for examining and evaluating writing assessments, this book is a provocative and essential read for administrators, teachers, policymakers, parents, and all who care about the education of our children.
In Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Asao B. Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is “more than” its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts.
Language Arts Workshop: Purposeful Reading and Writing Instruction presents a manageable way of organizing instruction, exploring a gradual release of responsibility through meaningful experiences in all areas of need for literacy development, including oral language, spelling, vocabulary, word study, fluency, and comprehension. Like an apprenticeship, novice readers and writers learn a craft under the guidance of a skilled and knowledgeable teacher. Through the language arts workshop, students read and write everyday, spending time working with their teacher, collaborating with peers, and working independently. Learn to model successful language arts teaching for your students Workshop format addresses the diverse learning needs of students, including English language learners, students with disabilities, and students who read at, above, or below grade level to support early interverntion or response to intervention programs. Predictable chapter organization clarifies the workshop approach and framework. Authentic examples from successful classrooms engage readers and model effective language arts instruction. A strong focus on assessment grounds the instruction, and a compendium of assessment tools prepares readers to drive their own classroom.
Adler-Kassner and O'Neill show writing faculty and administrators how to frame discussions of writing assessment so that they accurately represent research-based practices, and promote assessments that are valid, reliable, and discipline-appropriate. Public discourse about writing instruction is currently driven by ideas of what instructors and programs “need to do,” “should do,” or “are not doing,” and is based on poorly informed concepts of correctness and unfounded claims about a broad decline in educational quality. This discussion needs to be reframed, say Adler-Kassner and O'Neill, to help policymakers understand that the purpose of writing instruction is to help students develop critical thinking, reading, and writing strategies that will form the foundation for their future educations, professional careers, and civic engagement. Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning is grounded in the best of writing assessment research, and focuses on how to communicate it effectively to publics beyond academe.
This book explores what writing for pleasure means, and how it can be realised as a much-needed pedagogy whose aim is to develop children, young people, and their teachers as extraordinary and life-long writers. The approach described is grounded in what global research has long been telling us are the most effective ways of teaching writing and contains a description of the authors’ own research project into what exceptional teachers of writing do that makes the difference. The authors describe ways of building communities of committed and successful writers who write with purpose, power, and pleasure, and they underline the importance of the affective aspects of writing teaching, including promoting in apprentice writers a sense of self-efficacy, agency, self-regulation, volition, motivation, and writer-identity. They define and discuss 14 research-informed principles which constitute a Writing for Pleasure pedagogy and show how they are applied by teachers in classroom practice. Case studies of outstanding teachers across the globe further illustrate what world-class writing teaching is. This ground-breaking text is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the current status and nature of writing teaching in schools. The rich Writing for Pleasure pedagogy presented here is a radical new conception of what it means to teach young writers effectively today.
With this updated document, IRA and NCTE reaffirm their position that the primary purpose of assessment must be to improve teaching and learning for all students. Eleven core standards are presented and explained, and a helpful glossary makes this document suitable not only for educators but for parents, policymakers, school board members, and other stakeholders. Case studies of large-scale national tests and smaller scale classroom assessments (particularly in the context of RTI, or Response to Intervention) are used to highlight how assessments in use today do or do not meet the standards.
