Subject B Summary of the Findings by Type The findings for Subject B indicate that the most improvement was on the Six Traits writing rubric (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2011), with a significant increase in their overall writing. The pretest score for this student showed a poor performance, with the body of the story having only 3 sentences. Although this paragraph had a beginning and ending, the sentences were choppy, and the idea was not developed completely. The word choice was minimal, and although there was an attempt at voice, it was not fulfilled due to the lack of well-developed sentences and rich vocabulary. The posttest writing showed great improvement with a fully developed topic and appropriate voice and word choice. Her story about a feral cat named Tori is included in the appendix. This student improved from a score of 1 on the pretest in idea and voice, to a 5 on the posttest in those areas, showing a significant gain from unsatisfactory to proficient. In organization, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions, Subject B improved from a score of 1 (unsatisfactory) to a 3 (satisfactory) on the Six Traits writing rubric. Her overall score improved from a 20% to 80% due to improvements from the pretest. This showed a 60% gain in this student’s writing. This student clearly benefitted from instruction in Six Traits writing, and the language used during the writing process. Another gain this student made was in the word analysis assessment, which contributed to the quality of the writing sample. A score of 44% was recorded for this student on the pretest of the word analysis and 79% on the posttest, showing an increase of 25% points. The results indicate significant growth in skill in segmenting words into affixes and root or base words and analyzing word parts for meaning as well as providing a definition for the deconstructed and analyzed word. This student benefitted from the explicit instruction in morphological word analysis and showed understanding in the area of analyzing words for meaning, which should aid this student in increasing vocabulary and reading comprehension. Subject B’s TOWL-3 (Hammill & Larsen 1996) subtest 6 and subtest 8 scores showed a slight gain in contextual conventions and story construction. The pretest and posttest scores remained constant in contextual language. The overall score showed a slight increase from a 96 percentile rank to 99. This indicates that this student’s scores were relatively high in all areas, but were slightly lower in contextual conventions due to lower scores for punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. The scores remained the same for the pretest and the posttest. Assessment Measure Pretest Score Posttest Score
Summary of the Findings for Each Subject by Feature (subtests)
Findings were not submitted for the Six Traits writing rubric or for the Word Analysis assessments, as there were no subtests administered for those assessments. Subject B Subtest Pretest Score Posttest Score
The results of the spontaneous writing portion of the TOWL-3 (Hammill & Larsen 1996), yielded the most improvement in story construction for this student with an improvement of 7%. This measure indicates that the feelings, plot, theme, prose and sequencing of the written piece, as well as how well the writing relates to the picture prompt was well done for this student’s age. The contextual language score remained stable as no improvements were made in grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure. The contextual conventions subtest measuring spelling, punctuation, and capitalization was slightly improved and yielded an excellent score of 84% for this student, which indicates that this student had a good understanding of proper spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of proper names.
Discussion of Pre/Post Change for Subject B: This student showed gains in the TOWL-3 (Hammill & Larsen 1996) spontaneous writing subtests of story construction with a 7% point gain, and contextual conventions with a 4% point gain. This student’s score on Contextual language stayed the same at 84%. This would indicate that this student paid more attention to the detail of proper spelling, punctuation, and capitalization and improved her score on contextual conventions. Her story construction score improved due to her organization of her ideas in the piece, and a more interesting story as details were added that depicted the space journey of the characters in the story. The contextual language subtest score showed no gain for this student, indicating that no improvement was made in using longer correctly spelled words, sentence structure, syntax, and grammar. This student’s writing improved by 27% points, from the pretest writing sample scored by the Six Traits Rubric (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2011), to the posttest writing sample. This student’s written piece, scored with a Six Traits writing rubric (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2011), was produced with considerably more detail showing evidence of greater idea development. The story also contained more of the student’s voice in the telling of the story of finding a feral cat and trying to tame it by offering food. This was done by introducing more dialogue and explaining how she reacted when the cat showed up on her doorstep. Her story was also well organized and the sentences showed fluency in their construction as well. This student’s pretest writing sample was short, and although there was a slight hint of voice in the story of how she helped do the dishes, it was a simple and underdeveloped piece of writing, lacking good descriptive words and idea development as details of the story were missing. The conventions exhibited were satisfactory, in light of the simplicity of the piece, this student perhaps was cautious in expanding her ideas as it may have resulted in mistakes. The instruction that was provided in trait writing emphasized creativity and this student showed evidence of that in the difference between her pretest and posttest writing samples. The results of the word analysis assessment showed that this student’s ability to segment words and provide the meaning of the word parts improved from 44% to 79%, making a gain of 35% points. This student was able to give correct definitions to all but one of the words and correctly deconstructed all but one of the words into word parts, properly segmenting the affixes and the root or base words. This student will have greater ability to decipher words when unknown words are encountered during reading. As these words are incorporated into the student’s word schema, it is more likely that this student will have more potential in using these richer words in written work. Analysis/Discussion of Subject B's Change (Response to Intervention)
Subject B was a motivated and engaged student who enjoyed writing after this intervention, even though she said she preferred math. She had stated that she was a creative person, and she seemed to enjoy the creative process of writing. She was pleased with her work, especially after writing her story on the pretest for the spontaneous writing on the TOWL (Hammill & Larsen 1996). She wanted a copy of this story to take home and show her parents. In the past, this student seemed stuck on what to write about, but as I coached her in being as expressive and creative as she could be, this seemed to free her from the constraints of having her writing be perfect with regard to conventions. This student needed to know that the important thing in the writing was the creativity, and that we could worry about correcting the written piece during the editing phase. Examples from Results to Support Analysis Subject B improved in her writing by including more detail in her story about a time she was helpful. She also was able to write in a way that her voice came through as she told the story of the feral cat that came to her doorstep. She included a description of the cat: “She also has a teeny bit of gray on her fur.” She also explained how they named the cat: “We named her Tori because at that time we did not know if she was a boy or a girl.” The dialogue with her mom illustrated how she found the cat and asked her mom if they could name her. This piece of writing was in contrast to her pretest piece that consisted of a few sentences, no detail, and very little of her voice present in the writing. |
