by Laura Bross
For a long time, I was much better at assigning writing than teaching writing. Looking back, my students were often just doing writing rather than learning how to write. I could come up with plenty of engaging activities, but I really didn’t know how to explicitly teach the skills students needed to become stronger writers. For students who already found writing difficult, that often meant frustration rather than success. I knew I needed to do better, but I didn’t know where to start.
In 2019, I began learning about the science of reading. Over time, that grew into a broader interest in the science of learning and becoming a more evidence-informed educator. As my knowledge and confidence grew, I began shifting my professional learning toward a missing piece in my classroom: writing.
My writing instruction improved slowly. Eventually, I found Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), and it changed writing instruction in my classroom. POW + TIDE, self-talk, and explicit sentence construction instruction helped bring together the foundational skills, oral language, vocabulary, and knowledge-building work we were already doing.
After a full year of SRSD, I could see growth in my Grade 2 students. Students who initially struggled to write independently for two uninterrupted minutes could write for much longer periods. They used strategies and self-talk more independently, and their beginning- and end-of-year writing samples showed noticeable differences in both quantity and quality.
But I was missing something: data to help me measure that growth and inform what I did next.
My Next Step: Writing Assessment
In reading, I regularly use curriculum-based measures (CBMs), including oral reading fluency measures, to screen, monitor student progress, and reflect on my instruction.
I realized I wasn’t doing the same thing in writing. I had writing samples and observations, but I wanted a quick, repeatable measure that could help me answer an important question: Is my writing instruction changing student outcomes over time?
So, this school year, I’m learning how to use writing CBMs in my primary classroom. Two resources are helping me get started:
- Website: Intervention Central’s Curriculum-Based Measurement
- Book: The ABCs of CBM by Michelle K. Hosp, John L. Hosp, and Kenneth W. Howell
What Is a Writing CBM?
A writing CBM is a brief, standardized way to sample a student’s writing performance and monitor change over time.
Students are given a writing prompt and a short, consistent amount of time to write. Their writing can then be scored using specific measures, such as total words written, correctly spelled words, or correct writing sequences.
A writing CBM is not intended to tell me everything about a student as a writer. It doesn’t replace looking closely at student writing, conferencing with students, or assessing the ideas, organization, and craft within a larger piece.
Instead, I see it as one more useful data point—one that is quick enough to collect repeatedly throughout the year.
Giving It a Try
At the beginning of the school year, I gave my first writing CBM. The administration itself was quick and required very little preparation. My students didn’t mind at all—it was only a three-minute task!
To prepare, I used the Written Expression Probe Generator linked above. With just a few clicks, I had a one-page assessment ready to print, including the prompt, writing lines, and a scoring guide at the bottom. I selected the prompt, “In the morning, I opened my door and saw five horses standing in the street. Then…” because many of my students live in a rural community and I thought it would resonate with them.
The administration guidelines were also very clear and included a simple script for me to follow. Overall, it was quick to prepare, straightforward to administer, and manageable within our regular classroom routines.
Scoring was a little tricky at first. I found myself returning frequently to the scoring instructions and examples: Does this count? Is this a correct writing sequence? What about this one? The examples provided in the resources were helpful, and I can already see how scoring will become much more efficient with practice.
Most importantly, the results gave me a beginning-of-year data point. Using the reference norms, I found that most of my students fell below the 50th percentile on all or at least one of the measures I examined.
That doesn’t tell me everything I need to know about their writing, but it does give me a place to start.
From Assessment Back to Instruction
The point of collecting this data isn’t simply to generate another score. If I am going to assess something, I want the information to help me think about instruction.
Based on my beginning-of-year data, what I know about my students, evidence-informed writing instruction, and the Ontario curriculum, I’m focusing on three areas:
- Transcription: We continue to build handwriting and transcription fluency through regular practice. Literacy Lifter is a helpful free resource for supporting explicit transcription instruction. To learn more about the resource and why transcription matters, check out Shawn Datchuk’s ONlit webinar, Handwriting: The ABCs of Explicit Instruction and Assessment.
- Sentence construction: Students practise sentence writing every day through our Do Now, sentence dictation during phonics instruction, and explicit sentence expansion and combining. Ready-to-use sentence construction activities can be found in the Syntax Resources within ONlit’s Learning Through Literacy units. The Appendix B3 Continuum: Language Conventions for Reading and Writing, Grades 1-9, is also a great resource for understanding the syntax and grammar expectations for your grade level.
- SRSD writing instruction: We continue to work through POWeR cycles using POW + TIDE, self-talk, modelling, guided practice, and gradual release. ONlit’s Learning Through Literacy units provide mentor texts, background knowledge, vocabulary, prompts, and exemplars that I can use and adjust based on my students’ needs.
Up Next: Progress Monitoring
To start, I plan to use a writing CBM approximately every three to four weeks. I can then look at the data alongside students’ classroom writing and ask: Is my instruction working? Who is responding? Who might need something different? What should I adjust next?
Where It Matters: The Classroom
Now it’s time to put the data to work through instruction.
Over the next several months, I’ll continue teaching, collecting data, reflecting, and adjusting. Keep an eye out for a second blog post this spring, where I’ll share an update on what happened: how students’ writing changed across the year, what I learned from progress monitoring, and whether writing CBMs helped me make better instructional decisions.
My progress toward evidence-informed instruction started seven years ago, and I certainly didn’t change everything at once. I learned something, tried it, reflected on it, and found the next gap in my practice.
This year, one of my next steps is learning to use writing CBMs. If writing assessment is one of your next steps, too, start small: explore the writing CBM resources from Intervention Central or The ABCs of CBM by Hosp, Hosp, and Howell.
Improving our practice doesn’t mean changing everything at once. Sometimes it starts with noticing one gap, learning more, trying something new, and making thoughtful changes along the way.
Laura Bross is a Grade 2/3 teacher from Lucknow, ON, and is a member of the ONlit Team.
