Qualitative

Introduction

One example of qualitative data that I use to inform my instruction is student writing. When reviewing writing assessments, I look at my students' work and compare it to a rubric our kindergarten team and administration created together. Then I assess whether students are able to fulfill our rubric goals at least 80% of the time. Finally, I place students into Stages where I can group them more easily based on what skills they are working on next.

All of my students this year were unable to write words in August, but through careful instructional choices, by the end of the year most of my student will be able to write multiple independent sentences. In this section I review three different students' progress with writing throughout the year and discuss how they have made the progress that they've made, and what I hope to see them achieve this spring. I analyze individual progress from October, November, January, and March writing pieces and discuss what I expect them to achieve by May and how I will continue to support this growth.

Grading Criteria

Students go through a few distinct stages of writing in kindergarten. Before looking at specific student data, I review the first four stages that we expect to see in kindergarten, and a breakdown of the skills that my team and I decided were necessary for students to be able to advance between stages. More about these stages can be seen on the previous Written Responses page, which also outlines how I use these stages as a qualitative ELA assessment.

Stage 1: Pre-Literate Writing

Students who are pre-literate are working on mastering basic fine motor skills such as pencil holding and directionality while writing. Once they are able to write letters or letter-like marks and draw pictures with a deliberate purpose they are ready for stage 2. This is a beginning of year kindergarten, or pre-kindergarten, stage. Some students who attended pre-school begin the year on Stage 2.

My focus as a teacher with students in this stage is on fine motor skills, letter formation, and thinking about meaning before creating. I have these students practice writing letters on whiteboards so that they are more easily able to erase and try again when need be. I also have them practice explaining what they want to write and draw before they begin to make sure they are focused on the intent and outcome of their communication.

Stage 2: Emergent Writing

Emergent writers are learning that letters have meaning and can be used to create words purposefully. They are beginning to understand that letter sounds can be used to help decide which letter to write. To reach the next level, these writers must be are able to copy a sight word or sentence stem from a board, label a picture with the correct letter sound, attempt spacing, and prove basic phonemic awareness.

To practice these skills, I might have students try to first write the beginning sounds for different words provided orally. For example, if the word was "jumps", would they know to put a "j" first. This can be demonstrated through picture labelling and writing the correct beginning sound when sounding out a word. The next level for this would involve adding other letters to a word being sounded out, for example writing "jmp" for "jumps". Students do not need to have all relevant sounds or to include medial/vowel sounds to advance to the next stage.

Stage 3: Transitional Writing

When students reach the Transitional stage, they are beginning to write comprehensible sentences that express an idea. They can attempt all parts of a word (first, medial, and last sounds) with relative accuracy. They are learning to use spacing between words and are writing with a clear purpose in mind. At this level, students can also accurately use sight words that they heave read on the sight word wall and can copy them correctly into their sentence. They use capitalization and punctuation with some accuracy. When students complete Transitional level goals, they are ready to move on to multiple sentences.

Students practice these skills independently during centers time on whiteboards and in their free writing notebooks. They also learn how to sound out and write longer words during group writing time on whiteboards or in their class notebooks, where they will attempt to create blends or multiple vowel sounds, for example writing "Micol" for "Michael" or "stap" for "stop".

Stage 4: Fluent Writing

Completing the Fluent level writing skills is our current end of year goal for kindergarten. Being on the Fluent level at the end of the year will indicate first grade readiness, and passing all categories on this level will indicate advanced writing skills. On this level, students should be writing accurate, legible, complex sentences with varied vocabulary and multiple ideas. Students who reach this level at the end of kindergarten will be ready for future learning goals, such as being able to write paragraphs by second grade.

To help students move to this level from the Transitional phase, I focus on getting them to preplan their ideas. At every stage, students have opportunities to share with partners or the class what they want to write before they begin writing. We focus on counting the number of words in a sentence, and also repeating the sentence the student intends to write multiple times to ensure clarity before writing. This helps them make their longer writing pieces more intentional. We also practice using descriptive words orally and sounding them out so that students feel confident inserting them into their writing.

Student 1

Student 1 began the year with an understanding of some letter names and sounds, but had not previously learned how to use this sound understanding to write words. She began the year as an emergent writer and is now a fluent writer, on track to meet our end of year writing goals.

Note: The sentence prompt has three lines drawn with the intention of students writing a simple three word sentence, i.e. "Bojangles sees butterflies". The word "sees" was provided, the other words students were expected to sound out.

October

Student 1 was able to identify two relevant letter sounds in her first word (starting with "BJ" as an attempt at writing "Bojangles"), and she copied two other words she wanted ("see" and "pink") mostly accurately from the board. She did not yet understand spacing and was missing an attempt at the word "butterfly". According to our rubric, scored below, she was a pretty strong Emergent writer at this stage. Her next steps, which I practiced with her during weekly writing time, were to work on spacing and considering each word she intended to use before writing.

November

By November, Student 1 advanced to the Transitional writing phase because of her attempts to use letter sounds (first, medial, and last) to create unknown words and her accurate use of sight words in the sentence. She was able to write "fr" for "first", "lid" for "little, "bi" for "built", etc. She was still working on spacing and thinking about the careful placement of words before writing. For example, her first line was meant to say "The first little pig was smart", but she ran out of room and wrote "he somot" on the third line instead. She also wrote "wut" for "was", which is a fair phonemic attempt but suggests she was unable to read the word "was" and copy it accurately from our sight word wall. To practice these skills, we reviewed creating a finger space as a class and learned how to count the number of words you intend to write before beginning. This helped her learn how to preplan a sentence so it does not run on.

Note: Students were given the prompt: The _____ is meaner because _____.

January

By January, Student 1 was ready to move on to the Fluent stage because she demonstrated 80% mastery of the remaining Transitional skills - spacing, decipherability, sight word usage, and punctuation. She was able to write this sentence with a small sentence starter and used more varied words and descriptive language to prove her comprehension of the story "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." Her next steps to improve this writing were to add multiple sentences and practice sounding out all the sounds in a word. To reach the next level of phonemic understanding she should be attempting blends and more medial sound. For example, she writes "dit" for "didn't", "l" for "let", and "bil" for "billy", consistently dropping some of the sounds in the words. To help her with this skill, I began introducing longer words including blends and digraphs for students to practice on whiteboards during our daily phonics lessons.

March

Student 1 is currently a more advanced Fluent level writer, and is working on writing multiple detailed sentences about a single subject. She is able to read and write a variety of sight words, as seen in her piece here. Her sentences are preplanned and make logical sense. Based off of this recent writing, she is ready to be introduced to even more advanced phonemic concepts such as r-controlled vowels to write the "er" in "water" and to review ending word blends to turn "cot" into "cold". She is however making some progress with sounding out longer words such as "wotr" for "water". She is still working on adding detail to a single topic. In this piece, she uses descriptive language to explain a scientific process in a way that proves her writing skills and comprehension ability, but she stills needs some practice writing multiple equally thought out sentences about a single topic.

Conclusions about Student 1

Student 1 began as an Emergent writer, and has currently mastered 5 out of 7 steps of the Fluent writer stage. She has learned how to use sight words, how to sound out a variety of unknown words, and how to follow grammatical conventions such as punctuation and capitalization. I have helped her with her growth through full group instruction, centers practice, and individualized reviews. At her current rate, by the end of the year Student 1 should be able to write longer pieces with more varied vocabulary and use of descriptive language. She will be well prepared for first grade writing, where she will be able to write a topic sentence, details, and a conclusion about a single subject.

Student 2

Since the beginning of the year, Student 2 demonstrated high oral comprehension. However, he had little previous experience with writing beyond writing his name and practicing letters in isolation. He also demonstrated a lack of familiarity with some verb conjugation (in the examples below he wrote and dictated "see" instead of "sees", "come" instead of "comes", etc). Through careful instruction and additional practice throughout the year, he has advanced from Emergent writing to almost completely Fluent. He is currently on track to surpass our end of year goals.