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The issue
Limiting potential
A strong foundation of literacy skills gives students the means to formulate new
knowledge and express their knowledge and ideas.
NCEA Assessment
Written assessment is the predominant means of formal assessment in NZ.
Different subjects use language in very different ways important to teach subject-specific literacy strategies
(Wilson, 2013).
Inquiry Outline
Cycle One
Cycle Three
Identified issue
Cycle Two
Final assessment
Subject-specific vocabulary
strategies
Baseline Data
For both Year 10 classes, I marked their paragraphs for their end of unit assessments. This gave me a
baseline and identified issues to work on. I also identified three priority students to work with: Elijah and
Ben.
What I did?
Predicting, defining and drawing new words.
This strategy raises students awareness of key
words and encourages them to think about
their understanding of what these words
mean.
Impact?
Students recall and use of these words
increased, as reflected in their book work.
Next steps?
Students now need to learn how to put these
words into practice in their writing.
Mindmaps
Students have more knowledge than is reflected in
their writing.
Why?
Students need a way to organise information so
they know how to include it in their writing.
How?
First focused on what are and locating hard
facts; modelled mindmapping; structured
activity growing mindmap in pairs using
newspaper articles
Impact?
Increased use of hard facts and detail in writing.
Next steps?
Students still struggling with how to structure a paragraph and how to
organise these hard facts within their writing. Next step is therefore to develop
paragraph structure.
Writing Frames
Why?
To scaffold paragraph writing for students,
modelling how to structure a paragraph and
giving a starting point for students who get
stuck (Ministry of Education, 2004).
Impact?
Gave struggling students somewhere to start
and build their paragraphs from. Those who
didnt need it used their own sentence starters.
Summative Assessment
Ben and Elijah both improved their writing by incorporating more specific information and improving the structure of
their writing.
Data
Same task (different question) and same marking criteria, however students had more time
and preparation for Summative Assessment.
Previous Unit
Assessment
Summative
Assessment
Ben
20%
80%
Elijah
40%
86%
Class average
67.6%
81.3%
Reflections
Students need multiple times to practice strategies (Ministry of Education, 2004). I had time
restrictions in implementing my inquiry - students had 2-3 times per strategy only.
Needed more time to practice. The paragraph on tropical cyclones was by far the strongest
because they had already wrote on in class previously.
Needed to explicitly teach and model paragraph writing - assumed they would already be very
familiar with this but they were not.
Next Steps?
Explicitly teaching paragraph writing
Functional language analysis (Fang & Schleppegrell,
2010)
Bibilography