Teacher assessment of students\u27 writing skills

The purpose of this study was to examine an alternative approach to the assessment and monitoring of students\u27 writing skills using teachers\u27 expert opinions and ratings. A sample of 107 teachers rated three separate student essays from a database. The students were equivalent in age, grade level, IQ, and gender (male). One student was designated as learning disabled in writing. The other two students were achieving within low average and average expectations, respectively. Teachers rated all three student essays using the Writing Rating Index for Teacher Evaluation (W scRITE), a ten-item Likert-type scale based on current theory and research findings. Teachers also indicated if the student authors should be designated as learning disabled in writing, and selected appropriate intervention strategies for all three students. Results suggested that teachers\u27 ratings were internally consistent but not stable over time. Although teachers rated certain mechanistic aspects of an essay (such as handwriting quality, punctuation and capitalization rules, use of grammatical and syntactical rules) with a certain degree of reliability, they were less reliable in their ratings of the more spontaneous aspects of writing (theme development, creativity, and text cohesion). Additional results suggested that teachers were able to accurately identify the essay author already designated with a Learning Disability in writing and differentiated him from his average and low achieving peers. Teachers were also able to identify a variety of W scRITE items as writing components in need of remediation from the essay authored by the learning disabled student. Furthermore, teachers selected several interventions aimed at improving the writing skills of all three students. The implications due to the limited test-retest reliability of teachers\u27 ratings and the use of the W scRITE as an assessment and monitoring instrument are considered

Teacher practices for teaching writing in Greek primary schools

Developing writing skills is a central part of the education curriculum in many countries, yet numerous children have difficulties in producing written texts. To our knowledge there is no systematic study examining the ways in which Greek teachers adapt their writing instruction strategies to accommodate the children’s needs. The aim of the present study was to identify the approaches teachers employ while teaching writing in Greek primary schools and to examine the nature and frequency of these different aspects of teaching writing. We replicated and extended the Dockrell et al. (Read Writ Interdiscip J 29(3):409–434, 2016) study, using the Not so Simple View of Writing framework. One hundred and three teachers responded to an online questionnaire, which consisted of questions regarding their academic qualifications and their specific teaching practices. The majority of the sample felt prepared and enjoyed teaching writing. However, almost all of the teachers found teaching writing challenging and half of them reported that supporting struggling writers was difficult for them. Overall, teachers reported more work at word level, occurring almost weekly, than at text level. Differences between Grade levels they taught were also evident for specific domains of writing. Recommendations for future research and implications for educational practice are discussed