Specially Designed Assessment of Writing to Individualize Instruction for Students

Introduction

Assessment plays a foundational role in the field of education, particularly in special education. Conducting formative assessments is essential for special education teachers and inclusive general education teachers who collaboratively, systematically, and continuously monitor and adjust specially-designed instruction based on student progress towards individualized education program (IEP) objectives (Mastropieri et al., 2023). In 2016, the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), special education’s major professional organization, identified assessment as one of the four “practice types” among the 22 high-leverage practices (HLPs) (McLeskey et al., 2017). The HLPs reflect skills that K-12 special education teachers should demonstrate. For example, in the area of assessment, special education teachers should be able to use a variety of assessment measures to identify students’ strengths and needs, interpret and communicate assessment information to design and implement educational programs, and use student assessment data to analyze instructional practices and make necessary adjustments that improve student outcomes. For the teaching of writing, teachers need to use formative assessments to document student learning and to direct their instructional decision making, and this type of responsive instruction of writing needs to extend across different subject areas (Graham et al., 2014).

The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide (a) a description of an analytic persuasive writing rubric to assess students’ disciplinary writing and (b) guidance as to how practitioners can use this rubric to make data-driven decisions about students’ writing instruction within various disciplines. Although writing practices differ across disciplines to reflect the norms, practices and discourses of those disciplines (Colwell et al., 2022; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012), using genre-specific rubrics is a strategy that can be used across disciplines, however the content of the rubrics should differ. The rubric presented in this chapter is a component of a research-based, persuasive writing strategy for grades 3-12 students that includes a digital teacher dashboard for teachers to access and assess students’ writing with an analytic, genre-specific rubric. Specifically, a teacher uses a provided analytic rubric that aligns with the technology-based writing strategy to assess student performance and then systematically makes instructional decisions that will improve students’ writing outcomes. The authors refer to this process as data-driven decision making or DDDM (Park & Datnow, 2017; Reeves & Chang, 2018). To assist teachers in the DDDM process, decision trees or maps have been embedded in the dashboard to guide the teachers in selecting a targeted instructional move that is responsive to the identified area on the writing rubric. These instructional maps will be described in further detail later in this chapter. Since the analytic rubric is part of a digital tool, the authors suggest that the reader refer to https://wego.gmu.edu/tbgos-current.html to request login credentials to the free, chrome-based tool. Having access to the entire tool will assist in understanding all of the explanations in the chapter.