NWREL Archives
Northwest Report
September 1996

New Edition Guides Primary Writing Assessment

A publication that began as a collection of workshop materials has evolved into a full-fledged book. The new edition of the popular guidebook Seeing With New Eyes is bigger, meatier, and even more useful in helping primary teachers integrate writing assessment with instruction.

After visiting "dozens upon dozens" of primary classrooms and working with teachers and students around the region, author Vicki Spandel has greatly expanded upon the ideas and tools presented in the first edition. Like the old version, the new version is built around the six traits of effective writing: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, fluency, and conventions. But lots of explanatory text has been added, along with ample samples of student work and practical ideas from teachers in the field.

Among the new features are:

Spandel first defines the six traits, explaining how they look at the primary level. Traits such as voice and word choice, she says, show up first in the pictures children draw and the stories they tell aloud-even in the expressions that appear on their faces. Teachers can nurture students' development in these areas by listening, responding, and encouraging. Notes Spandel: "Encourage students first to be gatherers and collectors of information, as well as observers of life, to look carefully at the world around them, and to share what they see orally, through their pictures and through their text. Later, as they write more, look for focus, meaning, a clear message or story, strong details, and direct statements like `I like horses.'" When you see these things, help children see the power of their own writing, too."

As a place to start in guiding students toward effective writing, Spandel offers a developmental continuum that can be used as a checklist to celebrate new writing skills. For each of the six traits, the continuum details what a student can do at four levels of proficiency: the exploring writer, the emerging writer, the developing writer, and the fluent/experienced writer. Says Spandel: "The continuum is positive, focusing on what children can do, not on their deficiencies. It is based on the premise that all children, at all levels, are proficient. Experience merely expands that proficiency."

What's especially noteworthy about the continuum, Spandel points out, is that it integrates all of the language arts. "The continuum," she says, "recognizes that children learn to write and demonstrate their writing proficiency not only by moving a pencil across the page, but also through reading, listening, speaking, thinking, and borrowing."

For the trait of "word choice," for instance, an emerging writer begins listening for favorite words or new words when text is shared orally; often uses labeling to enhance pictures; shows expanding vocabulary in oral storytelling or dictation; asks for clarification on word meanings; enjoys brainstorming "other ways to say it"; makes good guesses about meanings of new words heard in stories; and recognizes that similar words (such as big and enormous) can have slightly different meanings.

Once a student writer regularly achieves at the fluent/experienced level of the continuum on all six traits, she is ready for assessment on the regular six-trait assessment scale, says Spandel. The guidebook offers a teacher-developed scoring guide that primary writers can use to assess their own work. Developed by Jollee Ellis of Homer, Alaska, the scoring guide is a set of 11 examples of how student writing looks at increasing levels of proficiency. Ellis displays the 11 examples as posters hung around the room. Students can then compare their work against the posters to see where they are in their own growth.

After presenting and discussing a wide range of student samples, Spandel takes readers through the seven steps of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, sharing, revising, beginning editing, additional editing for experienced writers, and bringing it to closure. But, she is careful to note, "It is much less important to go systematically through the steps and stages of the writing process than to help primary writers understand that writing is thinking, and because it is thinking, it takes time and sometimes changes. This change, which is up to the writer, is called revision."

Using second-grader Sara Knight's portfolio as an example, Spandel offers guidance for designing and using portfolios for primary literacy instruction and assessment. Sara's portfolio includes a letter to President Clinton ("How do you like living there? I am learning about Washington, D.C.) There's a personal narrative about the time her sister burned her finger on the stove and a reflection on the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Also included is a research report on anteaters ("The anteater sucks up food with his long, slick tongue"). Her international writing sample on rain forests suggests, "You can help the rain forest by not buying stuff like bananas and coffee."

Other chapters in the guidebook offer tips and classroom activities for teaching the traits to primary writers. It also answers 10 questions teachers frequently ask about teaching the traits.

Copies of Seeing With New Eyes: A Guidebook on Teaching and Assessing Beginning Writers can be ordered from NWREL's Online Catalog.

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