We are less than one week away from the TCAP Writing Assessment for our 8th grade students. The Language Arts teachers have been working tirelessly all year to have nearly 350 kids ready to show everything they know about expository writing in 35 short minutes.
Our students have practiced writing essays throughout the year, both in Language Arts classes and our computer labs. We have tag teamed with those teachers since the beginning of this semester to double up on the training, tips, and tries that kids get before February 2nd.
I think the work is paying off.
This year we’ve done two things differently in our labs. First, we purchased a trial number of log-ins for Write to Learn, an essay grading program from Pearson. While we’ve found a few flaws along the way (nothing can take the place of a pair of eyes scanning a page), for the most part this program has done a fairly decent job of demonstrating the skills of our students. Some score a little higher than we would expect. Some score a little lower. Over all, however, it seems to do the job. And the immediate feedback the kids get cannot be replaced. It has been fun to watch their eyes light up when they see how their score increases when they make just a few improvements here and there.
Second, we produced a short number of videos for kids to watch based on the theme of “Cheat Codes.” Kids that play games online are looking for websites that offer cheat codes, a series of tutorials on how to get from one level to another. We decided to do the same thing. We’ve harped on adding similes and metaphors, anecdotes, quotes, vivid verbs, and more. It has been fun to see their reaction when we tell them we are going to teach them how to “cheat” the test (in reality, there is no way to do this). Through a little slight-of-hand teaching, kids have started to do better on first drafts, spend more time editing and revising during testing time, and seem to have more of a desire to do better up front.
Only time will tell how well we’ve done. What about your school? What are you doing to help kids improve writing skills?