Student Criteria Analysis – Writing

About this report

Information

Data Source: Check-in Year 6 Writing assessment

Updated: Writing reports will be updated following completion of marking (November)

Designed for

Teachers, Principals, and school leaders can use this report to explore how the student has performed in the Year 6 Check-in writing assessment.

Directors, Educational Leadership, and Executive Directors can view all schools within their network.

Benefits

How can I use this report?

This report will assist schools to identify students who may be in need of additional support to develop specific writing skills. The summary data can be sliced by Stage to identify performance at Stages 2, 3 and 4 of the NSW English K-10 syllabus. Use of this report will support reporting against School Excellence Framework elements: Student performance measures and Data skills and use.

What should I look for?

The purpose of Check-in Year 6 Writing assessment is to identify students’ current strengths and areas of need. This report allows schools to get a detailed overview of the student’s performance including areas of greatest strength and areas for improvement against eight criteria.

Notes about Year 6 Check-in Writing

Please note the following reasons why the Year 6 Check-in Writing Assessment is different to NAPLAN and therefore why the feedback in Scout should not be directly compared to NAPLAN results.

The Year 6 Check-in Writing assessment:

  • is informative, not persuasive or narrative, because most subjects require explanations.
  • is a formative assessment, not a summative assessment. The overall mark is irrelevant.
  • is diagnostic – it does not rank students in bands or otherwise compare students.
  • reports to teachers, not to students; however, teachers may provide feedback to students.
  • focuses on capability, not errors. It identifies the ability demonstrated by the students.
  • focuses on specific criteria linked to the National Literacy Learning Progression, not all writing skills. For example, it does not assess:
    • tense, subject-verb agreement, noun agreement, articles, prepositions or apostrophes of possession.
  • Another difference from NAPLAN is that apostrophes of contraction are not assessed in punctuation, but at score 2 in spelling, as that is where they are in the Learning Progression.

Diagnostic assessment requires a focus on specific skills. Therefore, indicators in the National Literacy Learning Progression have been identified so that teachers will know exactly which skills students have or have not demonstrated.

For example, the Sentence Complexity criterion assesses the development of grammatical complexity in sentences as defined by the clause structure, not the students’ punctuation. Therefore, the students’ punctuation is ignored by markers for this criterion and is marked separately. If students have low scores in Sentence Complexity, they will need to learn how to combine simple sentences using subordinating conjunctions. If students are writing the way they speak, they may need work on developing their oral language.

On the other hand, the Punctuation criterion assesses whether students have correctly placed their full stops and clause commas and therefore it assesses their knowledge about clause structure and where sentences and clauses begin and end. These distinctions have been made to assess separate skills in the Sentence Complexity and Punctuation criteria without overlap.

As the Sentence Complexity criterion does NOT assess use of tense, subject-verb agreement, noun agreement, articles, prepositions or possessive apostrophes teachers should use a separate language assessment for these aspects of literacy.

Using the report

Select the results you want

The slicers at the top of the report allow you to select the results you want to be displayed.

  • Step 1 is required for data to be shown in the report. Select a school. Check you have the correct year to view results for, e.g. Year 2022.
  • Step 2 is optional and allows for further refining by enrolment type, group type, student group, EAL/D, Gender, and/or Aboriginality if you want to do so.
  • Step 3 is required to select a student to generate the report for. By default, the first student on the list will be selected.

If you do not make any selections in Step 2, the report will continue to show all results available to you under each of these categories.

Image: Selection example

View the charts

Your selections will automatically be applied to all sections of the report.

Summary

This section of the report will provide a quick snapshot of student writing performance.

Name of the student with SRN, achieved score, maximum possible score, and duration in minutes for writing attempt by the selected student.

Image: An example of Student summary

Note: Students with non-attempts or suspected plagiarism (copy and paste from internet) are excluded from this report. Whereas a student score may be ‘0’ due to insufficient skills.

Student Results by Criteria

A multi-column chart displays student scores by criteria in the following order: Text structure, Paragraphs, Ideas and elaboration, Vocabulary and technical language, Cohesion, Sentence Complexity, Punctuation, and Spelling.

Image: An example of Student results by criteria

Response by Criteria

This table displays student’s performance by each writing criterion, Skills Description, Score, Progression Level, Progression Description and Syllabus Outcome

Image: An example of student responses by criteria.

Need further support?

Category:

  • Teaching and learning

Business Unit:

  • Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation
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