Writing Standards Analysis

When reviewing progress reports for a cohort of students as they move across kindergarten through sixth grade, it is evident that GCCS students are able to critically think and communicate in authentic and meaningful ways.

This data set shows the class of 2018-2019’s academic progress towards the writing standards W.1, W.2, and W.3 over the course of their time at GCCS - from kindergarten through sixth grade. These standards require students to clearly communicate across the opinion/argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative writing types. Academic progress is rated on progress reports as advanced, accomplished, developing, emerging, and incomplete. At GCCS, advanced means that students are working beyond grade-level AND were provided a task to demonstrate beyond grade-level work. Accomplished means students are demonstrating grade-level proficiency, and developing means students are able to meet grade-level expectations with scaffolding and support. Students who are rated as emerging are not able to do grade-level work, even with support.

As students moved through each grade, writing tasks increasingly require critical thinking through the application of learning and research from expedition in authentic and meaningful ways. This data shows that as this cohort moved through each grade, over half of the students consistently met or went beyond grade-level expectations for each type of writing. Additionally, this data shows that in each grade very few students from this cohort were unable to do grade-level work. Narrative writing stands out as a strength overall for this group of students.

This data set does indicate there is more work to do with regards to students’ ability to demonstrate critical thinking and communication in writing. Overall student proficiency dips in the upper elementary grades as the content and structure of texts becomes more complex and the demands of the writing standards increase.

Based on this data, we plan to closely analyze students’ opinion/argument and informative/explanatory writing in the upper grades (grades 3-6) to see if there are trends in what is holding students at these grade-levels back from proficiency. To continue to develop the capacity of teachers, some of our next steps include continued calibration around our measures of academic progress on our progress reports as well as vertical calibration around the scoring of students’ writing for each type of writing. We also recognize the need to differentiate more for students working above grade-level by providing them the opportunity to complete tasks that go beyond grade-level expectations.