Analysing Writing Data - what can I do?

It's that time of the year ... Report Writing! 

Today during our staff meeting we've been looking through Edpotential - a new platform to accessing data from Manaiakalani Cluster right through to our team 4 data.   This is our e-asTTle writing graph. 

From this data - as a team we looked at the following questions:

1. Can you see any trend/s we can be confident about?

• A general trend towards the norm, but not quite matching as high. MELAA had a huge shift up - what caused this? Who are the students? 
• Asian students are tracking above the norm
• Y5-Y6 Maori were below the PES norm and Pasifika data, but in Y6-7 they were above 

2. What do you think is going on?

• Summer drop off

• Focusing more heavily on writing when testing comes around, but not throughout the year

• Differences sometimes affected by students in the cohort

• Some of our bright students left at the end of the year e.g. Izyn, Israel Te Maro, Izzy and Isaiah etc

• During lockdown - most students did not select or do the writing task. Mostly focused on the reading and maths tasks. 

3. What are the most obvious challenges inhibiting our children’s progress? (stick to things we can control or make a difference to)

• Spelling

• Building specific vocabulary

• Punctuation - basics e.g. capital letters, full stops, commas, speech marks

• Organisation - clear orientation, body of text with events, conclusion. Linking ideas between and within paragraphs

4. What can we do that we are actually in charge of?

• Analyse data trends in PAT, STAR & easTTle data - where are the gaps?

• Start explanation writing sooner (or other genres) to support shift to that genre in Year 7

• Offering more opportunity for writing in class - particularly tasks which focus on engagement to encourage more buy-in from hesitant students

Using Tanya Mundy's MIT 'create writers' this has guided me to build their skills.

Since analysing my class data for this year, I've started this week for writing to include more 'basic' skills to help with how to use Capital letters. With nouns - what is a noun and why we need it to construct a simple sentence. 

As a warm up, we will be using 'Pobble 365' for 10 minutes, applying a skill in their writing eg: using speech marks, punctuation, organisation etc ... Will look at different genre's of writing to build our learner's repertoire writing. Watch this space - to see our learner's progress!