Writing is thought to be the most complex facet of language arts. Assessing writing is difficult and subjective, and few scientifically validated assessments exist. Research has proposed evaluating writing to use a multidimensional approach including both qualitative and quantitative measures of handwriting, spelling, and prose. Given that narrative writing has historically been a staple of literacy instruction in primary grades, it is essential for teachers to understand how to measure beginning writers writing development and sources of writing difficulties through narrative writing. Guided by the theoretical models of early written expression and using empirical data, this chapter exams ways teachers can enact a comprehensive approach to understand beginning writers' narrative writing through assessment. The goal is to help classroom teachers structure a framework in assessing early writing in primary classrooms.
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Writing is thought to be the most complex facet of language arts and for most of us, one that must be taught through explicit instruction (Bazerman et al., 2017; Graham, 2019). Many English Language Arts (ELA) teachers are facing the predicament of writing in schools. On the one hand, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) data has consistently showed a nationwide lack of proficiency in writing among K-12 students (Graham & Harris, 2015; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2012). On the other, reading has been given priority in ELA instruction block across most schools, leading to unbalanced attention to writing instruction. This lack of writing instruction in the curriculum has many unintended consequences, especially when children moved from Learning to write in the primary grades to Writing to learn beyond the upper elementary school. Children need to learn the skill-based and compositional aspects of writing early on, through explicit writing instruction, so they learn the foundational writing skills in getting ideas on paper: how to generate ideas, translate ideas into expressive and grammatically correct sentences, paragraphs following the convention of the target discourse, equally importantly how to transcribe words onto paper with handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy. Later, they also need rich writing instruction so they can build on their foundational writing skills to learn how to write effectively across disciplines. The purposes for writing are often varied across disciplines, given that each discipline has unique language conventions, discourse, and text genres (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). When writing a story, students should be able to use story grammar to organize the text structure. However, when writing an experiment report in science, students should know how to use procedural knowledge, appropriate text genre and science specific vocabularies. Writing at this later stage is commonly used to assess students’ content learning and as a way for exploring new ideas and developing critical thinking skills. This is fundamental for American education to maintain its edge in its global competitiveness. Authors of the National Commission on Writing (2003) described writing as essential to the development and refinement of ideas. Different skills in writing as they are, early writing and disciplinary writing are interconnected. We believe that the foundational skills in early writing set the stage for the more complex disciplinary writing later on. For example, the bottleneck phenomenon where young writers have difficulty in transcribing ideas into words could suppress the writers from engaging in high-level skills in writing (Kim & Park, 2019). Therefore, to equip our school-aged children with these essential writing skills, literacy educators need to find ways to support students writing development at both the learning to write and writing to learn stages.