District Writing Assessment
The District Writing Assessment asks a child to perform two types of writing. Narrative writing is thought to be text-inspired and is generally informational or explanatory. Opinion writing, on the other hand, is often argumentative. These two types of writing are mentioned in the Common Core, and the later state core goals. Total scores for both types of writing are compiled. The mean and standard deviation values for the two types of writing, for the experimental and compared to the control group children are presented in Table 5.
Please Insert Table 5
This assessment was done one time during the 2014-2015 school year. The scores of the children in the control group were slightly higher than for the children in the experimental group for both types of writing. The variation in the scores for children in the experimental group was lower for both the narrative and opinion protocols than for children in the control group. There was not enough data to subject these results to an analysis of variance. However, the trends in the data appeared to be much like those for the other three assessments. It is highly unlikely that we could reject our null hypothesis based on these data.
Average change for three assessment protocols across three assessment periods.
One way to compile these data would be to compute the average change in assessment scores during the school year. Three of the four assessment protocols were administered during the Fall, Winter, and Spring assessment periods. It is possible to compare those three periods in terms of average change for the experimental as compared to the control group children. Average change data for the three assessment protocols administered during the school year appear in Table 6.
Please Insert Table 6
In general, the change data indicates more similarity than difference between the two groups. The change in scores on all three assessments was greater for the Fall-Winter comparison than for the Winter-Spring period for both groups.