What did the data show?
Interviews:
Before students began taking the final writing assessment, I interviewed my students one on one about what tools they found to be most helpful and how they felt these writing tools had helped them with their writing. From the interview, I gathered most students found the writing checklist and conferencing to be the most helpful. Many students that had selected conferencing as the most helpful selected the writing checklist as the least helpful because they were not able to read it. Where the checklist had included pictures, some of the pictures may not have been as clear to students for what they represented. The students that had selected writing checklist as the most helpful said that it helped them in knowing what to do. This was great to hear because it gave them focus and purpose in their writing.
Conferencing/Field Notes:
Each time I conferenced with a student I recorded my notes from our conversation on their conferencing sheet for the day. Many of the teacher tips I gave each time focused on conventions for my lower writers and more complex skills for my higher writers. From my field notes I noticed that at the beginning of data collection I referenced our classroom goal setting chart often during conferencing, however towards the end I was not utilizing the goal chart as often as I would have liked. From the conferencing sheets, many students continue to work on using punctuation correctly and are still continuing to work on the goals we set at the beginning. Students really enjoyed pulling out the writing checklists to look over their writing and I found many more students using finger spaces than they had before the checklist. Overall, I recorded the most growth in writing stamina from my lower writers that went from copying words around the room or recording strings of letters to writing complete sentences and stretching out the sounds in words.
Writing Scores:
At the beginning of my data collection students were given a pre-writing assessment that focused on narrative writing. The post-assessment was an informational piece graded on the same scoring rubric including ideas, organization, voice/word choice, and conventions. When analyzing student scores I found that many of my low scoring students had made the largest gains in their scores from the baseline writing assessment. The students that continued to score the same or decreased their score by one point were the 3 higher students that were selected. When looking at these lower scores in conjunction with the conferencing notes collected I found that the higher students had been conferenced with less than the low to medium achieving students which may have attributed to the stagnation or decrease in scores.
From the results obtained from this study, I found that the use of goal setting, conferencing, and writing checklists did help most students to improve their writing scores. The writing tools had the most impact on low scoring students, providing them with more structure, visuals, and direction than they would have otherwise had on their own.