The seventh grade students all recently participated in a baseline writing exercise to support our district writing goals. While this assessment does not count toward the student's grade, it will be used as a pretest to establish overall incoming strengths and weaknesses. The genre for this task focused on summary writing, which has not yet been covered in class this year, but is a required writing genre for seventh grade.
The article summarized by the students had to do with scientific debate about the validity of DNA in crime detection. The majority of students were successful at attempting the task. Most were able to form proper topic sentences, and used appropriate vocabulary and key words to support their topic sentences. The students' use of proper conventions, such as capitalization, spelling, and punctuation, was often stronger than their actual writing content. Some students had difficulty with grasping the issues of the debate. Others had difficulty focusing or organizing their thoughts around the article's topic. Still others were not on task in terms of summarizing, and instead inserted their own opinions or ideas on the subject. This past week, during the minimum days, the 319 papers generated by students were evaluated anonymously with a four-point rubric and will be quantified as a group. Students will have the opportunity to review their individual assessment in their core classes.
Data from these papers will be used in several ways. The pattern of overall strengths and areas of concern will be shared with other grade levels, as well as with elementary-level teachers. We will be better able to focus on areas that need more attention as we address writing in general, and summary writing specifically. The students will perform a similar writing exercise in the spring of 2005, and at that time we will compare the two assessments in order to ascertain student levels of improvement.
