March/April 2002 | NW REPORT

Creating
Good
Writers

Spark learning with new and colorful 6+1™ Writing assessment products

Products Poster

From Idaho to Texas; Istanbul to Tokyo. Requests are rolling in from across the United States and overseas, from American schools in Beijing, Bangkok, Bahrain, Istanbul, Athens, London. At points around the globe, educators are asking the Laboratory to show teachers how to use the 6+1 Trait™ Writing assessment model to help students become better writers. They know that when assessment is at the center of instruction, both students and teachers gain valuable insight into students’ learning.

Recent developments are catapulting the model to greater heights of popularity and availability. New partnerships with large education publishers and distributors, as well as the release of a new model to support writing in Spanish, is bringing the power of the 6+1 Trait™ to ever more classrooms.

Developed nearly 20 years ago and regularly refined by input from teachers, the model is used in every state in the nation, and beyond, to help young writers master the key traits of good writing. At the center of the model is a scoring guide, or rubric, that lists seven traits of good writing—ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation—and briefly describes six levels of proficiency. Supporting the rubric are descriptors providing detailed criteria for each level of proficiency in each of the traits. These descriptors help teachers and students to evaluate students’ writing, promoting a shared vocabulary for discussing what makes for good writing and providing useful feedback that helps students revise their work.

In the mid-1980s, a collaborative effort involving teachers and consultants developed the first version of the writing assessment model with six traits. Since then, Ruth Culham and other members of the Laboratory’s Assessment Program have worked with teachers and schools to refine that model to offer a highly effective and reliable assessment tool. The model enables teachers at all grade levels to gather meaningful information about student writing performance—beyond single scores and standardized tests—that can be used to guide instruction.

By evaluating research findings and thousands of papers at all grade levels, Culham and her team identified six common characteristics of good writing, and these became the framework for a six-trait analytical model. In 1999, an additional trait, "presentation," was added, giving the model its current form as 6+1 Trait™ Writing.

Teachers wanted an instrument that would provide accurate and reliable feedback to help guide their instruction and students’ self-assessment, says Culham in an online introduction to the 6+1 Trait™ Writing assessment model (www.nwrel.org/assessment/).

"When an exhaustive search didn’t produce such a tool, they rolled up their sleeves and began the difficult process of creating an analytic scoring system that would be valid, honest, and practical."

The model is designed to be used by teachers and staff development providers who are trained by Laboratory trainers to implement and sustain the use of the model back in their districts. While a teacher can get started using the 6+1 Trait™ model by consulting the Web site and purchasing support materials, to be truly effective in integrating assessment into everyday instruction, she must receive training.

Several times a year, the Laboratory presents 6+1 Trait™ Writing training institutes around the country. Participants learn to use the rubric and scoring criteria, integrate writing assessment into everyday instruction, use teaching strategies that connect the model to the world of the developing writer, and set up their own training sessions. (Watch the Up & Coming pages from the Laboratory’s Web site, www.nwrel.org/comm/whatsnew.html, for dates and locations.)

Today, new materials are being added to the tools available to help teachers integrate the traits and scoring criteria into their daily instruction. In this way, teachers and students can use a common vocabulary to discuss the writing process and follow a well-marked pathway to writing mastery.

One of the newest developments is a set of eight videos for trainers—introducing each trait and reviewing the entire 6+1 Trait™ Writing assessment process—and a facilitator’s guidebook with sample overhead masters and other support materials. The videos and guidebook were produced by the Laboratory and are being distributed by Carson-Dellosa Publishing, Inc. of Greensboro, North Carolina. Carson-Dellosa also has developed classroom bulletin board sets and other classroom aids to help teachers infuse the traits into everyday learning (see "Posters, and charts, and checklists, oh my!" ).

Additionally, Assessment Program Director Dean Arrasmith, Culham, and others have designed a study of selected schools, seasoned users of the 6+1 Trait™ model, to discover what they’ve learned about using the model to help children become good writers.

"We hope to identify: When writing assessment and instruction are going well in a 6+1 Trait™ classroom, what is the teacher doing that makes a positive difference? Are there specific strategies that successful teachers implement? Are there certain characteristics or styles of teaching that are most effective? If so, how do we share these with others?" asks Culham.

To order the videos, bulletin board materials, and more visit the Web site, www.carsondellosa.com, call (800) 321-0943, or fax (800) 535-2669. Many other 6+1 Trait™ assessment resources are available from the NWREL Products Catalog Online, www.nwrel.org/comm/catalog/.

| Next Article | Front Page | NW Report Index |

Creating Good Writers

Spark learning with new and colorful 6+1™ Writing assessment products

Creating
Good
Writers