Heaps of Data with Error Coding

I tried a technique this weekend called Error Coding that is elaborated on in The Formative Assessment Action Plan. Below, I included an example of Error Coding that Fisher and Frey use in their power point.  Though the errors being coded for are not the same as mine, you can get a quick overview from looking over the chart.
 

For the last several years, I have had students conduct an interview of another student in the class and then create a birthday card for him/her.  This year I added a step; in between the interview and the card, I had them write a paragraph about the person they interviewed using the info they gleaned through the interview.  They needed to look for patterns and info that would belong together, and then construct a paragraph with that info.  They were told that their paragraph should not contain most of the info gathered because it would more than likely not all fit with the topic sentence.  I created this assignment in order to see how adept my students were at synthesizing evidence, creating a claim, supporting the claim with evidence, and weaving their sentences together logically.  Furthermore, I also wanted to gather information about what grammatical skills they demonstrate with proficiency and which skills need to be revisited.  After collecting the one paragraph responses, I sat down and commenced with the Error Coding. 

To my surprise, the students (at least the class I have already looked over) by and large do not struggle with any of the grammar concepts that I was coding for: commas, subject verb agreement, and parallelism.  Though a few students made these errors, most students exhibited strong grammatical control.  However, what I noticed right away is that far too many paragraphs were too safe.  The reason there were no errors might have been because most students did not take risks in their writing.  There was nary a semi-colon, colon, or hyphen to be seen; in fact, there were very few commas.  While some students used compound and complex sentences, many (probably a majority) only had simple sentences with a compound subject or predicate.  In terms of informing my instruction, this realization is huge.  Rather than giving them rules and practice sentences where they fix the error, these students need exposure to strong writing and varied, complex sentences, which should hopefully make them feel safer as they take writing risks.

Also, I realized a few other things.  I need more practice.  At a few points in my collection, I read a sentence that I didn't know what to do with.  It was definitely wrong, but I didn't know how to classify it.  What exactly did the student need help with?  Where should I start? 

But last & not least he favorite colors purple & favors the company Yamaha. 

The student uses a transition to signal that this is the end of the paragraph, which is good, but I am still not sure where to start on the rest of it.  I may show him the sentence that he wrote and see if he knows what about it might cause confusion on the part of the reader to see if he can give me any more input to help inform my initial instruction with him.

I also came across a few students with some additional grammatical errors that I was not tracking, like prepositional errors and homonym errors that I need to revisit through individual instruction.  

In terms of synthesizing evidence, creating a claim, supporting the claim with evidence, and weaving their sentences together logically, we have a lot of work to do.

All in all, this process took a short amount of time.  In fact, I graded the period while I was waiting for my husband to get out of his doctor's appointment.  I probably could have finished at least two periods; however, I knew the lady at the front desk and spent at least half the time talking to her.  I feel like I gathered a substantial amount of data about my students and their skills that will help to inform my whole class, small group, and individual instruction. 

Four Part Assessment Plan

Teachers who use formative assessments target their instruction to student needs.  Teachers who do not use formative assessments rely on guesswork or generic plans, rather than basing their instructional decisions on data.  

In the article "Formative Assessments in High School," Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey outline their four step approach to formative assessment: feed-up, checking for understanding, feedback, and feed-forward.  During feed-up "a clear purpose should be communicated with students on a daily basis."  The purpose of this is to zero in on the lesson target, so students and teacher know exactly what the focus is.   Checking for Understanding is the second element, and the name of their other book that I just finished reading.  Oral language; questions; writing; projects and performances; and quizzes and tests are mentioned as "excellent ways that teachers can check for student understanding."  The third component is feedback.  What struck me immediately about Fisher and Frey's discussion of feedback is that, though it is important, "feedback by itself has limited impact on student understanding and thus achievement."  Though I can agree that some feedback is like this, from my other reading so far, the right kind of feedback does seems to result in dramatic impact on student understanding and achievement. Fisher and Frey released a new book called The Formative Assessment Action Plan, which fleshes out their ideas in this article, so perhaps it will provide more on this topic.  The last element of the formative assessment system, and its arguably most important part, is feed-forward, which "ensures that data is collected and analyzed for patterns so that the teacher can make informed decisions about what should be taught next.  To accomplish this task, they suggest an error analysis sheet.  "The error analysis sheet is a concrete example of the ways in which formative assessment system can be used to plan instruction" because once the data is gathered and analyzed, the teacher can plan whole class, small group, and one-on-on remediation for specific, targeted skills and content, thus providing the quality instruction and intervention needed.

Photo of labyrinth from vgm8383, who explains "the term labyrinth is often used interchangeably with maze, but modern scholars of the subject use a stricter definition. For them, a maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage with choices of path and direction; while a single-path ("unicursal") labyrinth has only a single Eulerian path to the center. A labyrinth has an unambiguous through-route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate."