Contents: Preface. Part I: The Objectives of Evaluation. In the Background: How We Feel About Grading. Specific Situations: Putting Evaluation Into a Context. The Pieces of the Grading Puzzle. Part II: Evaluation Options. Approaches to Grading. Response Strategies. Management Systems. Evaluation Styles. State Standards and Assessments. Part III: Using Grading as a Teaching Tool. Tools of the Trade: Choosing Evaluation Options in a Communication Setting. Transcending the Red Ink, or Making Grading Serve Teaching. Teach Yourself to Grade, or the Grading Process in Action. Appendices: Sample Papers. Annotated Bibliography. State Scoring Guides.
Evaluating Children's Writing: A Handbook of Grading Choices for Classroom Teachers, Second Edition introduces and explains a wide range of specific evaluation strategies used by classroom teachers to arrive at grades and gives explicit instructions for implementing them. Samples of student writing accompany the instructions to illustrate the techniques, and an appendix of additional student writing is provided to allow readers to practice particular evaluation strategies.More than just a catalog of grading options, however, this is a handbook with a point of view. Its purpose is to help teachers become intentional about their grading practices. Along with recipes for grading techniques, it offers a philosophy of evaluating student writing that encourages teachers to put grading into a communication context and to make choices among the many options available by determining the instructional purpose of the assignment and considering the advantages and disadvantages of particular grading strategies. Specific grading techniques are integrated with suggestions about the craft of evaluation--guidelines for instructional objectives, for student audience analysis, and for teacher self-analysis that help define communication contexts.New in the Second Edition:*a new chapter on state standards and assessments;*a reorganization of the chapter on approaches to grading;*additions to the chapter on management systems;*additions to the chapter on teaching yourself to grade;*additions to the annotated bibliography; and*updated references throughout the text.
This study reports the results of a three-year longitudinal evaluation of a National Writing Project site and illustrates the value of using multiple sources of data to evaluate aspects of National Writing Project sites. We examined the immediate effects of the Summer Institute by looking at teachers' reactions to writing process Instruction both before and after the Summer Institute. We also examined longrange effects by looking at how teachers implemented the writing process in their classrooms over an extended period following Institute participation. Results indicate that during the Summer Institute teachers moved from self-oriented concerns about the writing process to concerns about how this approach would influence students and fellow teachers. Results also indicate how attendance at the Summer Institute affected classroom practice. We conclude with implications and questions for further study. In this paper we present the results of a three-year longitudinal study of a newly-established National Writing Project site. We used multiple sources of data to evaluate the effectiveness of our work and the strengths and weaknesses of the model of professional development. As teacher educators we shared Writing Project assumptions about successful staff development. We expected to work together as partners with our public school colleagues; we believed that successful teachers have the greatest credibility in local staff development programs; and we believed that writing was so fundamental to learning that Summer Institutes must reach teachers from all grade levels and all content areas.
This text models for teachers how to help children learn and write by establishing comfort with writing, building confidence, and developing competence. Several themes run through the learning-to-write-process presented in this text:* Writing is communication;* Writing is a powerful tool for learning;* How children feel about their writing and themselves as writers affects how they learn to write;* Teachers are coworkers with students; children from many backgrounds can learn to write together. The text sythesizes what we know about how children learn, how we write, and what we write into a process of teaching children to write. It is intended to serve as a starting place for developing theories of how to best teach writing.
