This book is about evaluation -- the process which individual teachers use to arrive at marks for their students. It is not about school-wide assessment of writing or about state or national writing assessment. While most elementary teachers are charged with teaching writing, very few teacher education pro- grams include explicit instruction in grading writing. But evaluation is an important skill. Most schools require teachers to give grades, and society em- phasizes fairness in grades. Instinctively, teachers know that writing is a com- plex process, a process that requires mastery of context, content, form, and language. However, evaluation is not instinctive.Like most teachers of writing, I agree with Stephenand Susan Tchudi ( 1991), "In our ideal world, student writing and other composing would al- ways be 'graded' pass/fail, successful/unsuccessful, or credit/no credit" (p. 155). Unfortunately, however, most of us do not inhabit "ideal world" schools. However much we might wish to evaluate our students' writing as "successful/ unsuccessful," we are literally forced to grade writing. Without explicit instruc- tion in how to evaluate, most of us have taught ourselves to grade, haphazardly, often simply duplicating the way we were graded as students. As with many self-taught skills, learned by necessity rather than by design, evaluation is often a frustrating process for both teachers and students.The purpose of this book is to offer specific grading strategies and explicit instructions for using them, to offer options so that we may be intentional about our grading rather than haphazard. Evaluating Children's Writing is meant to be used with a group -- in-an in-service or in a class -- but it can also be used as a self-help, self-teaching handbook. It is meant to be used as a reference for step-by-step procedures of grading techniques that can be used at different times during the year. Evaluating Children's Writing offers suggestions about the craft of evaluation -- guidelines for instructional objectives, for student audi- ence analysis, and for teacher self-analysis that help define communication contexts. It also offers a catalog of techniques, options appropriate for a variety of classroom environments. The art of grading -- the ability to address the nu- ances of particular situations by designing innovative hybrids -- remains for the individual teacher to master with years of experience.
The Design of the Book
Evaluating Children's Writing is divided into three parts:
I. The Objectives of Evaluation
II. Evaluation Options
III. Using Evaluation as a Teaching Tool
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Publication Information: Book Title: Evaluating Children's Writing: A Handbook of Communication Choices for Classroom Teachers. Contributors: Suzanne Bratcher - author. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Mahwah, NJ. Publication Year: 1994. Page Number: viii.
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