MercuryNews.com | 03/01/2005 | Writing test’s elusive answers

Are California’s STAR writing tests really that conclusive? Can they accurately gauge student performance? Well, it’s hard to say, because we never get our papers back. Here’s the San Jose Mercury News article on it.

Writing test’s elusive answers SKILLS ARE HARD TO TEACH, HARD TO LEARN — AND HARD TO EVALUATE OBJECTIVELY By Larry Slonaker Mercury News Math and science have their frustrations and demons, but only one school subject has a special term for the seeming impossibility of doing it right. It’s called “writer’s block,” and that’s the obstacle California fourth- and seventh-graders will be trying to leap over today. As part of the state’s STAR testing system, the students will take a writing skills test. The exercise is designed to measure their ability to take information and transform it into something logical, intelligible, and, yes, readable. The test is now in its fifth year, and there is some controversy over how much value it has. Of all the basic subjects, K-12, writing is one of the most difficult for teachers to teach, and students to master. Many educators wonder if the state test offers a worthwhile measure of either endeavor. “There’s very little relation between the scores students receive from the state, and their performance” measured by an objective set of criteria, said Leif Fearn, a professor in the School of Teacher Education at San Diego State University. In a two-year study of fourth-graders’ performance on the test, Fearn found that elements of writing such as vocabulary and length and complexity of sentences were not at all reflected in the grading. Asked what he perceived the basis of the grading to be instead, Fearn said, “I am at a loss to say.” The writing skills test has been administered to state fourth- and seventh-graders since 2001. The state includes certain areas of writing — referred to as “genres” — for every grade level in its standard curriculum. For example, fourth-graders study how to write a summary of another piece of writing. Seventh-graders work on persuasive writing. Students do not find out until the day of the test which genre they will be tested on. Schools that don’t give the test today will administer theirs (with different content) April 26. The recommended time to allot for the test is 75 minutes. Students are told to approach the writing as a “first draft,” and not what their teachers might define as a finished product, which would require two or more efforts. So, students typically finish the test before the 75 minutes are up. When the booklets are collected, they are sent to the California Department of Education in Sacramento, which forwards them to a contractor for grading. This disconnect — neither the students nor their classroom teachers ever see the results — troubles many in the education field. The effect, says teacher Dave Fletcher, is like sending the material to “a gray zone.” Each student’s work is read and graded by two scorers, and the two numbers — from one to four — are added together. The score is tacked on to the student’s performance on a 75-point multiple-choice language arts test for a final STAR score in English. “It’s just a snapshot,” said Fletcher, who teaches fourth grade at Forest Hill Elementary in San Jose. “I don’t know how they expect to measure growth.” They don’t, admits Linda Lownes of the Department of Education. The change from year to year in the prompt “is itself going to generate different levels of writing.” Like many teachers, Fletcher has wrestled with the best way to teach writing. The prospect of having to grade scores of students’ papers — and attempting to write something instructive on every one — can be overwhelming. “I have 32 kids. It’s like having 32 little conferences,” he said. “It takes me two weeks to get through my class” when correcting a writing assignment. To get around that problem, teachers often concentrate on just one aspect of writing — for example, determining whether the student includes a vital detail in a summary, or rebuts the opponents’ point of view in a persuasive essay. “In the past, if I could avoid” giving writing assignments, “I would,” said Fay Ito, who teaches at Castlemont Elementary in Campbell. “However, now that we don’t feel we have to correct every misspelling and capitalization error, it’s so much easier to read and grade.” But Fearn questions just how effectively writing is being taught in California’s schools. It is typical for students to be told to “write about what you know,” he said. That’s not exactly a recipe for honing one’s skills. As a result, “Sixth-graders don’t write appreciably better than fourth-graders.” Even so, it isn’t realistic to expect writing instruction to get better any time soon, Fearn says. Society exerts much more pressure for better schooling in math and reading. One doesn’t see high-tech billionaires pounding the bully pulpit for better writing among America’s graduates. So at what point does a student get steered onto the path of good writing? Fearn’s answer is emphatic: “When someone grabs him by the scruff of the neck and tells him, `Forget what you’ve been taught. Now let’s get down to business.’ And the only person who can tell him that is someone who writes.” For many students, half the battle is overcoming that dreaded writer’s block, and finding whatever joy there is in the act of writing. Nicolle Wilson is already on her way there — she loves to write. Why? “I don’t know. I guess because I can express myself without being judged. Not immediately, anyway.” The seventh-grader at San Jose’s Morrill Middle School says she has no trepidation about today’s test. “I’m not really nervous,” she said. “What happens, happens.”