Each year, we get a pretty good idea of how kids across the country are doing with their math and reading skills. But writing? That’s a different story.
Few states test students on how well they can write, and the country hasn’t published national writing test results for elementary-age children since 2002.
Regardless, experts say they have a sense of how it’s going: “The word on the street is that kids can’t write,” said Vicki McQuitty, a professor in Towson University’s elementary education program and director of the Maryland Writing Project, an initiative aimed at improving writing instruction. Younger children struggle with basic sentences, spelling and punctuation, leading to problems later on in school when they’re expected to produce more complex works.
In Colorado’s Douglas County a few years ago, school district leaders noticed their students were generally scoring well on the state’s end-of-year tests, except when it came to the writing section.
“We found that teachers didn’t know how to teach writing,” said Janet Merrill, literacy coordinator for the school system, located in suburban Denver.
As is the case in many districts, teachers in Douglas County had largely been left on their own to teach writing. They were using a hodgepodge of methods, including buying materials online made by other teachers. Writing instruction varied greatly from class to class.
Merrill started researching science-backed ways to teach writing and learned that there are effective approaches that aren’t commonly known. The district hired Releasing Writers, an organization that trains teachers in a structured instructional method that gives students specific strategies to plan and organize their writing.
Within a year, middle school teachers were asking what was happening at the elementary level. They had never seen students coming to them with such strong writing skills. Now three years into the new writing program, scores across subject areas are going up.
What does the “science of writing” encompass, and what does it look like on the ground? Read my recent story, published in partnership with The Denver Post.
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