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.