ABSTRACT
Over the past 25 years in Australia, pedagogy and research about writing in the primary years have mainly focused on process writing and genre methodologies. Recent national benchmark data have raised concerns about the low quality of writing in middle and upper primary schools, which has led to ongoing problems in the secondary years. These data suggest, in fact, that many students reach a plateau in their writing development either before, or as, they make the transition from upper primary to lower secondary school. Given that much of the success of students in secondary school is measured by their ability to write effectively, it is imperative that there is further inquiry into improving the quality of student writing in Years 3-8. Recent writing literacy benchmark data demonstrated that whereas around 84 percent of children in Years 3 and 5 were meeting the benchmark standard, the levels flattened out, and in the case of Year 5 students, even fell slightly. Year 7 percentages have continued to fall steadily in the four years the data have been documented (Department of Education and Training, 2007). This chapter reports on a project that aims to build teacher capacity in assessing and teaching the linguistic, textual, and contextual levels of writing to students in Years 3-8, who are not meeting the benchmark standard. It has built on a pilot study funded by the Fogarty Learning Centre at Edith Cowan University. An extension of the pilot study throughout 2007 resulted in a collaborative arrangement between the Fogarty Learning Centre and the Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia (AISWA). This collaboration illustrates the power of productive partnerships in research with the education sectors and professional associations of Western Australia. We used a Formative Experimental Methodology (Jacob, 1992; Reinking & Bradley, 2004; Ivey & Broaddus, 2007), with the teachers as co-researchers, to develop a model of writing that provided teachers essential knowledge about what to assess in writing in order to support the further development of underperforming writers. Through the adoption of this experimental design, we began to develop an assessment model that helped teachers to more skillfully
analyze areas of weakness in student writing. As a result, we were able to link the assessment and teaching processes associated with writing in a way that supported a more targeted approach when working with students who were not meeting benchmark standards. This study became known as the Writing Project. The Writing Project sought to improve the effectiveness of the teaching of writing to middle to upper primary and early secondary students. The Western Australian Literacy and Numeracy Assessments (WALNA) data (Department of Education and Training, 2007) and National Benchmark data (MCEETYA, 2006) have indicated that the quality of writing in Australian schools is lower than it should be. When children enter secondary school without adequate written literacy skills, there can be a serious impact on the outcomes of their learning in all discipline areas and this, in turn, is highly likely to affect their life trajectories. Therefore, the children targeted in this project were those who:
• would not write-the avoiders; • had serious difficulties (such as an undiagnosed learning difficulty that
manifests in bizarre spelling); • did not like writing and did not make an effort (not engaged); • could write but were not developing as writers when engaged in more
complex tasks.
