Unit 6 - Designing Writing assessments and Assignments for the Primary Grades by Chinyere Hughes

Unit 6 - Designing Writing assessments and Assignments for the Primary Grades



As my experience as a teacher and becoming more student-centered, I have found that creating a more comfortable learning environment is essential even via the way in which a structure my lessons (the activities and strategies used, differentiation etc)

Also, I have realized that assessment is one aspect that is very essential in becoming aware of my students' understanding and comfort-level of the concepts.
However, from personal experience and while doing reading, I became aware of what is called writing anxiety, where the student experiences a sense of fear or pressure before and during writing.  This is a result of lack of confidence with spelling, grammar, ideas or any aspect of writing, fear of being judged as right or wrong, ridiculed or harshly disciplined for poor penmanship, lack of sufficient time to effective demonstrate writing skills and creativity and simply a general sense of not liking to write.

In order to assess my students while avoiding anxiety and focusing on simply 'testing or examining' for grades, I have realized that I can use methods such as compiling Portfolios, Journals, creative writing (such as stories, poetry and songs). This is effective because they are able to demonstrate their writing skills and abilities under more relaxed conditions and at any given time both within and outside (as assignments) the classroom.

But how can I use assessment to improve my students writing?  I will use results to ascertain the strong and weak areas so as to know how to structure my lessons (especially inn terms of activity choices and approaches).  One way I plan to use assessment is at the beginning of the school year, as a way of getting an idea of how my students view writing and how they would write different pieces, such as poem, story, letter.  This way I can become aware of their prior knowledge and also determine ways of how I can develop their writing skills and writing appreciation.
I also realized that using assessment to plan for writing instruction, involves a significant amount of reflecting because I would need to review their work, and determine their abilities and thus ascertain the appropriate strategies and activities. Most, of not all writing weak areas can be identified, such as spelling, grammar and simple comprehension skills.

The use of technology is on in which I plan to utilize to effectively teach writing within my classroom.  As we are living in a more technology based era, our methods of teaching should be of such nature.