Evaluate Writing - WRN’s Solution for Evaluating Student Work

As a middle school teacher, evaluating your student's writing can be one of your most time-consuming tasks. We know your time is valuable, and we want to ensure you don't have to spend too much of it grading papers.

We want you to be able to do what you do best…Teach!

Creating writing assessments across multiple classes and factoring in students' individual needs requires a solution to grading that helps you be accurate and consistent. This consistency will be beneficial to both you and your students. WriteRightNow's solution for evaluating student writing helps simplify this process and provides options for assessment criteria that streamline evaluation in the classroom or in a remote setting.

Whether you're evaluating whole-class performance or providing feedback on specific students, WriteRightNow has created an easy-to-use tool designed with teachers in mind that creates value for everyone involved!

Evaluating writing is an essential part of the learning process for students because it allows them to analyze what they do well and what areas need improvement. Not only do evaluations help improve writing skills, but they also build a student's self-awareness and confidence.

Having their work critiqued by their teacher gives them an objective perspective on what they can do to improve their writing skills and better express themselves. As such, evaluating writing allows students to become more empowered as creators of written work and gain a better understanding of the craft of writing.

At the most basic level, you can break assessment into two types: formative and summative. What's the difference between the two, and when would you use one over the other? A formative assessment is a piece of writing students complete to show how a student is learning during a class, lesson, or module. On the other hand, a summative assessment is a piece of writing students complete at the end of a class, lesson, or module. This type of assessment shows how much a student has learned.

 WriteRightNow makes it easy for teachers to create their own prompts for either assessment type. Another great feature is the prompt library, which allows you to select a prompt created by another teacher to use if it fits your content.

You undoubtedly assume many different roles when working with your students as a teacher. Even as a non-ELA teacher, teaching writing requires you to occupy quite a few you probably didn't envision when you took your first job.

 Here's how you can use the prompt library in WriteRightNow to give feedback when evaluating, depending on your current role.

Motivator- At this stage of the writing process, you need to motivate your students to start their writing projects. During this phase, having a section of comments set up to push your students to get words on the page will help you communicate efficiently.

Collaborator- As a collaborator, you are working with your students on their projects. They may need help expanding on their idea, or they may need more details to support their argument. Either way, having specific comments set up to deal with this case is beneficial.

Critic- In this role, your job as the teacher is to look at the various aspects of each student's writing and make a judgment about it.

Evaluator- As an evaluator, you are looking at your student's writing to make an opinion about the value of the work.

 Another thing to be mindful of when evaluating your student's writing is not to overwhelm them with feedback. It's essential to try and key in on a few specific areas when critiquing.

Rubrics are important in writing because, at their core, they allow students, parents, and teachers to see how good, quality writing looks. Providing set criteria to score writing samples lets you know that you score all student writing consistently.

With rubrics, writers can identify areas for improvement and focus their efforts accordingly. These rubrics help them get better at communicating their ideas through their writing. Rubrics also help focus the attention of both writers and evaluators on quality writing skills rather than on individual elements such as spelling or grammar.

Finally, rubrics provide objective feedback to teachers and students regarding the success of their writing efforts.

Six trait- The six trait rubric incorporates six different categories and has the evaluator score them 1-6. The categories are idea, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions.

Holistic- The holistic rubric scores a student's writing 1-6 with all criteria lumped together.

Oregon Essential Skills Requirement- The writing work sample is divided into two scoring forms: narrative and informative, expository and argumentative. This rubric gives teachers seven categories to rate on a scale of 1-6.

WRN CCSS Argumentative/Informative/Narrative- These three rubrics are provided by WRN and allow you to choose which you want based on the writing the students are working on in your classroom.

Letter Grade- This rubric uses the traditional A, B, C, D, and F grading framework. Each letter grade has an explanation to let students know what they need to do to earn that grade.

As a teacher, time is one of your most precious commodities. You want to be able to spend it with your students, not grading their writing. However, evaluating student writing is important because it allows you to gain data that can break down areas of improvement and identify students' strengths.

To be an effective evaluator, you must know your audience and purpose for writing the assessment. And finally, using rubrics will help to focus the comments section while streamlining the grading process— freeing up more of your valuable time.

Do you want to start saving time on evaluating student papers? That's where WriteRightNow comes in. WriteRightNow was created by educators for educators, and we know how important your time is.

WriteRightNow offers a free version with basic features, so you can get started today!