Assessing Students Writing

During my Tuesday Experience I have been able to observe many students doing writing activities and because of this have been able to tie what we have learned in class to what the students are doing in school. I never knew what students were capable of when it comes to writing, but after reading these samples and see them in school students have good things to write about. Sometimes it is hard to look past the errors in writing in order to see how great the ideas really are. In class we have learned to assess the students work both on how well it is writen when it comes to organization, fluency, and word/sentence variety, etc, and their spelling, grammar, and punctuation. We need to look at both aspects of writing when evaluating students work. There are a few students in my class at Whiting Lane who have great ideas but have a hard time organizing them and then writing them down correctly. Now that we all have this knowledge on how to assess the students work, we can then turn and help them become better in all areas of writing.

I was also unaware of the different stages that students go through in writing. I figured there had to be some sort of way to tell where they are in their writing but was not aware that these stages have been made up. I have learned that there are many ways to asses students spelling. All students have different ways of spelling and sometimes it is hard to see how they came up with the words, using the rubric we worked on today we can look at the stages and evaluate their spelling in order to put them in a category. Being able to look closely at something as important as spelling, we as teachers can help develop students weaknesses and also help increase their strengths.