Preparing to assess students’ learning
Look at the common writing assessment tasks and choose an appropriate task, then consider the following questions:
- What do the students already know about the topic of the task?
- What language resources do they already have to complete the task?
- What contextual (topic related) and linguistic resources (e.g. vocabulary, grammatical patterns etc.) do the students need to have to complete the task? Note that the tasks assume that students are already familiar with the topic and have most of the linguistic resources required to accomplish the task.
- Using the task implementation stages, plan how you will introduce the task to the students and how you will scaffold the students to complete the task:
- plan and prepare text models for students to analyse and work with
- plan how you might use joint text reconstruction strategies.
- Plan the success criteria to give to or negotiate with the students so that they can use the success criteria to help them:
- accomplish the writing task
- self reflect on their written work and provide peer feedback.
- Plan to observe the students as they write so that you can note the strategies they use during the writing process.
- Ensure that the time, space and resources needed for scaffolding, doing and providing feedback to the task are available. This process may take more than one or two lessons.