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Description of Assessments
Test of Written Language, 3rd Ed. (TOWL-3): This is a standardized test, which has a writing component with an illustration as a prompt for the writing in the story construction section. Students are told to write a story about the picture after planning what to write and to make sure the story has a beginning, middle, and an end. They are reminded before the writing that characters have names and perform certain actions, and that they should use paragraphs to help organize the story. The administrator also is directed to explain that punctuation and capitalization are also important and will help the reader understand the story. The TOWL-3 also contains subtests in vocabulary, spelling, style, logical sentences, sentence combining, contextual conventions, and contextual language. Students continue with each item in the subtest until 3 items in a row are missed, or they have reached the end. The teacher uses a form to score each subtest with raw scores, percentiles, and standard scores given for each subtest. The test booklet provides the scores and ranks the student’s performance in each area. This standardized assessment along with the writing rubric, word mapping, and morphological analysis of words provided an appropriate picture of the strengths and weaknesses of each student in vocabulary and writing proficiency. Analytical Trait Writing Rubric: This Six Trait Writing model aided in the assessment of the narrative writing pieces for the pretest and the posttest in order to gage the students’ progress in the use of rich, descriptive words in their writing, with particular focus on word choice. The rubric also assesses the areas of ideas, conventions, organization, voice, and sentence fluency. Morphological Analysis of Words/Word Mapping Assessment: This assessment provided results in students’ understanding of word/concept meaning and structural analysis of words through deconstruction of words into word parts (roots/bases and affixes) with definitions of the word parts and the word as a whole. Students were given a list of ten words to be morphologically analyzed and defined. Words were chosen from a list of Tier 2 words that these students have encountered in their texts. This assessment provided information on the depth and breadth of word knowledge the students had with these particular words, and if they understood the process of word analysis and word mapping. |
