Writing Assessment Fairness

     This year is the first year my school district is implementing writing assessments that are to be reported to the district and are to carry on in the students' files to middle school. The assessments are each quarter (not including first quarter) and are on the topic that was focused on throughout the specific quarter. A prompt is given, the students have 15 minutes to talk with their peers about brainstorming and then they have 30 minutes to complete the prompt and edit.
     It is important to assess student growth and performance, however I have an issue with the time restraint that has been placed on the students for this assessment. I feel that the entire writing process is negated by not allowing the students to draft, revise and edit their work in a large enough time period. I am also brought to the issue of how to grade these assessments. The entire fifth grade is completing the same prompt and the county has given a rubric to go with the prompt that we are to use to grade with. One of the main reasons there have not been standardized writing assessments is because of how subjective writing is. Individual teachers have different levels of writing expectations, recognize that what is great work and growth for one student may not, and probably wont, look the same for another student and keep this in mind when grading.
    My team has been left with the task of implementing this assessment with no choice and then having to grade all together. My teammates and I began discussing the fairness of the assessment and the only thing we came up with to try and lessen the subjectiveness of our grading was that we would each take 6 students from each person's class to grade so that no one class was graded by the same teacher. I think this is a good idea, yet I'm still left frustrated with the idea of fairness in writing.

Tier 1, 2 and 3

    My teammates and I are receiving modules for transition to the Common Core. This past week our module was on vocabulary instruction. The Common Core focuses on three tiers of vocabulary - tier 1, basic everyday language, tier 2, academic language that appears across numerous texts, and tier 3, content specific academic language. As I sat through this module, I thought back to our class discussion on word study and how important it is to make activities and the words in them authentic and meaningful. A point that was brought up in the module was how it is important that we, as educators, find the balance between telling the students the vocabulary terms before reading and letting them have a healthy struggle to figure out meaning through context clues and other strategies.

   It was also said in the meeting that the most important tier of vocabulary, and the most difficult, to explicitly teach are the tier two words. These are words that the students will encounter frequently, yet are not always given enough context clues to fully find the meaning. I left the module feeling like I had a lot of homework to do.

http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com/2012/09/commoncoreunpackingacademicvocabulary.html

I found this site with information on the vocabulary focus in Common Core. It gives an overview of each tier and goes into helping the educator with ideas for tier two words. I particularly liked how the site provides many technology based activities that are not time consuming, yet meet the needs of the educator. I think that using technology with vocabulary instruction would make the students more engaged as often times explicit vocabulary instruction is not the most enthralling activity for students.