Think Then Write: Criterion-referenced writing assessment/screener + scoring checklist

Within any class, writing skills vary widely – even into high school. To tailor writing support to each student, and to figure out quickly where a student is at with their writing skills, we’ve developed this short criterion-referenced assessment tool.

Starting with simple, compound, and complex sentences, we then screen writing skills with short answer questions using high-frequency academic verbs (e.g. describe, outline and explain). Next we step-up to questions requiring paragraph-length answers and verbal reasoning. Finally, we look at students’ narrative writing skills.

This no-prep 35-page screener is designed to elicit several writing samples. In addition to screening sentence, paragraph and short text composition skills, the multiple samples elicited enable you to comment on overall cohesion, patterns of spelling and punctuation errors, as well as handwriting. We’ve chosen topics that don’t require specific technical knowledge to control for background knowledge and are relatively age-neutral.

We’ve also included a 13-page Scoring Checklist (Google Form) so you may score your students’ results.