Assessment is a complex process and it serves different purposes for different people. When thinking about assessing literacy learning, I work on the principle that three different tiers of assessment are needed.
Firstly, we need assessments that inform learning. As teachers (and leaders), we need a toolkit of assessment strategies that help us delve into the learning of students, both what they have learned and how they are learning. This is the granular level that is the daily bread and butter of teaching.
Next, it is helpful to have school-wide mechanisms that give us insight into the progression of students’ learning as they move through school.
This may include teacher assessment tracking systems that measure learning against learning objectives or summative assessments of measuring curriculum coverage.
Finally, we need benchmarks that allow us to understand the attainment of students in relation to other students nationally, and internationally, often in the form of exams and qualifications.
KS2 literacy: assessing development
But assessing the development of writing can be a stickier, less reliable process.
We tend to track children’s writing development by collecting information in siloes; spelling, handwriting, their use of grammatical features, and alignment with the national curriculum objectives. We tend to look at writing produced at the end of a unit of teaching.
Assessing writing is a sophisticated task, relying on ongoing conversations and considerable subject knowledge - not to mention the complex issue of what is independent and what has been supported.
Easily applicable benchmarks that can help us measure progress over time, easily and reliably, would help enormously.
A new systematic review by Catherine Martin and Julie Dockrell aims to explore what the research says about assessing writing. It suggests that a standardised way of measuring writing fluency and a measure of writing accuracy may be valuable, especially for younger children.
The Total Number of Words assessment is an easy test to use. It measures exactly what it says: the total number of words a child writes, independently (on their own) in a set amount of time (perhaps 20 minutes).
In contrast, the Words Spelt Correctly test measures the accuracy of writing. It can be contrasted by Words Spelt Incorrectly to give a ratio measure.
Collecting this data over time can be a measure of progress and highlight students who are not making progress in line with the majority.
Easily accessible benchmarks
It may also help shift conversations away from what children cannot do (such as full stops and capital letters), or what they have not learned (how to use fronted adverbials) to noticing the small steps of progress that are being made with the entire process of writing.
In schools, we need to be skilled at analysing writing to understand what the next steps in writing development might be.
Easily accessible benchmarks that help us to measure progress over time and identify children who are finding it challenging to learn to write can also provide valuable, actionable information.
It is hard to have reliable measures of writing that allow us to track progress. Perhaps these ways of measuring progress can give us further insight into the stickiness of writing.
Megan Dixon is a doctoral student and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University
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