How to pre-test student writing to guide your teaching

Along with meeting new faces and setting up classrooms, the start of the term also means starting a new learning journey. Assessing (pre-testing) where students are at and tailoring your writing lessons to meet their needs is an essential part of that journey.

Pre-test your students

Pre-testing students’ writing will help you identify common strengths and weaknesses that need to be addressed in your teaching, group students more effectively and track progress over time.

The writing task doesn’t have to be big. It can be very small. It might be three days in a row or just a single session. One day you might have your students write a little narrative to a prompt. Another day it might be persuasive and another one might be some kind of informative text.

They might write for 20–40 minutes, it can vary depending on the grade, you just want a short, sharp and shiny snapshot of what they can do and what they’re able to demonstrate.

AI-powered assessment

The good news is that our new AI-powered assessment tool is now available to lighten the load. Simply bulk upload students’ pre-test responses in any format – handwritten, typed or scanned – and let the tool work it’s magic.

The tool will automatically assess students’ work against both the Seven Steps rubric and the NAPLAN rubric, providing explicit glow and grow feedback and clear next steps for improvement.

What’s more, it will generate a customised writing improvement plan linking to targetted resources that address the specific needs of your students. No stress, just a clear plan for writing success.

Decide on a focus

The Seven Steps approach is always to break it down. You can’t fix everything at once, so our new AI-powered assessment tool will help you identify which technique will make the most difference to a particular student or a group of students in your class. Small is always the best because we want to start small to end up big.

Use the analysis of students’ work to identify:

• How they have used a particular technique in their writing.
• How well they are applying the technique.
• How they can use the technique more effectively.

By finding out what they know and how they’re doing. You won’t over-teach, you’ll be able to see their progress and focus on the key techniques you can build on or areas that need further development.

Conference with confidence

A clear focus also makes it much easier for both you and your students to assess, self-assess and create writing goals.

When you conference with students, you can share the explicit glow and grow feedback on their work and co-create writing goals based on the suggested next steps.

Modelling this explicit feedback will also help students assess their own progress and they’ll start to say:

• ‘This is what I used to do. Now I’m doing …, I’ve grown as a writer!’
• I reached my writing goal when I …’ or
• ‘Today I didn’t … but tomorrow I will …’

When students are writing and working on a specific skill on a daily basis, they’ll gain experience and they will also have lots of little pieces of writing to look back on to see their progress.

Blog – 4 steps to setting writing goals

Tracking students’ progress

The beauty of your initial assessments is that it’s a clear snapshot of where you and your students started. When you post-test at the end of term or when you finish teaching a skill or Step, you can upload students’ work again to assess how much progress they have made and indicate what areas you need to spend more time on.

Visual growth charts for each student and the whole class will help you track and analyse students’ progress over time. We are confident that you will see some great outcomes!