Building From the Ground Up: A Writing Assessment Story

• In Event: 66.037 - Writing for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities: It's More Than Just Writing Their Names

Abstract

Given the limited research on teaching writing to SWSCD, foundational work was required before building the writing assessment. The purpose of this session is to communicate the groundwork for creating a writing instruction and assessment model. NCSC adopted the definition of writing as “Generating a permanent product to represent and/or organize ideas or thoughts so messages can be interpreted by someone else when the writer is not present. Symbols (e.g., picture symbols, objects) that represent and assistive technology that produce text may be used.” For full accessibility to SWSCD, traditional views of writing were expanded to include assistive technology, stamps, or pictures in the permanent product.
Using research-to-practice methods, the NCSC project built an alternate writing assessment based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) for SWSCD within the theoretical framework of a comprehensive model of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and supportive professional development. In a review of the general education writing process (i.e., prewriting, revising, editing/proofing, and final) and writing traits (i.e., content/ideas, organization, and grammar), experts were consulted about what considerations would be needed for providing access for SWSCD. In view of the state of writing instruction, both content and physical strategies were needed to help teachers improve their writing instruction. The opportunity for students to learn expressive writing, in addition to functional writing (e.g., writing checks), would be a new challenge for teachers.
Writing claims and prioritized content standards were created for evaluating the types of evidence needed on the AA-AAS. The first claim was that students could write effectively to entertain, to inform, and to persuade by generating a permanent product to represent and organize ideas or thought in response to provided text/sources. The second claim was that students could draw evidence from literature or informational text to write across different writing types (literary, informational, or persuasive) and apply grammatical strategies/conventions. Using the CCSS and learning progressions, prioritized writing standards were selected for inclusion on the AA-AAS. NCSC content experts and state partners were tasked to produce an assessment opportunity for students to demonstrate what they have learned and to explicitly identify sources of observable evidence for the writing assessment claims.
The ECD process (Mislevy, Steinberg, & Almond, 2003) was used to translate content standards into evidence for evaluating what students know and can do in writing. Building items to provide the greatest access for all students required a systematic design that was incorporated into the items. Details about the ECD process will be provided in Presentation 3.
This session will address these challenges and argue for a new perspective on writing assessment systems. Given the scope and scale of the NCSC assessment, the results will contribute significantly to changing the educational opportunities for all students, including SWSCD who historically have been educationally marginalized and excluded.

Authors

• Claudia P. Flowers, University of North Carolina - Charlotte

• Bill Herrera, edCount, LLC