Evidence #1: A Quantitive Analysis of Student Writing

To find evidence of whether my inquiry (interventions) has shifted student writing, I discussed ways to do this with Dr Jannie.  She suggested that I carefully analysed writing samples from the beginning of the year, pre intervention, and compared it to their most recent piece of writing.

This is an analysis of writing for 3 students in 9PKr: (M1, R1 and A1 are codes for the students names).  What I did was to select 3 students who were low, middle and upper in their asttle writing and PAT results to start off with.  I then gave collected two writing samples (Time 1 and Time 2).  I then compared the following:

• How many Notions and Ideas the student had

• Examples of complex word groups used

• How well ideas were expanded and detailed under text development

• If the student was able to write in an academic style

Using the vocab profiler called ‘Lextutor’, I put in the sample writings and calculated the number of simple, compound, complex and complex compound sentences in the sample.  The vocab profiler also calculated k1 (1-1000) and k2 (1001 - 2000), which counts the most frequent English words that people should know (eg k1 is the first 1000).  AWL stands for ‘Academic Word List’.  In the last column, I counted how many sentences/phrases were topic specific.  

Lextutor

I have linked the collated results here and taken screen shots of the evidence below:

Here are the links to each students of writing:

• M1
• R1
• A1

Summary:  After an extensive quantitive process of vocab measuring comparing times 1 to time 2 in my students' paragraph writing and looking at qualitative student voice feedback,  I found that the higher the stanine of the learner, the more stand out are areas of uplift.  A1 has made significant areas of uplift too, mainly a greater density of ideas and notions, and complex word groups.  R1 and M1 did not make as much gain as I’d liked.

After doing the analysis, it has became clear it is that their lack of vocabulary and their inability to expand ideas was sitting inside their writing.  This was evident even after the interventions I had applied in slowing down the learning.  Overall they also lacked organisational skills.  

My learnings from analysing data/writing academically is that I need to do this more to understand the needs of the students more purposefully and it definitely helps direct a clearer inquiry.  Quantitive data combined with a qualitative approach gives a more realistic picture of where our kids are at and how my teaching can be guided and informed when planning my inquiry.  In my next blog, I hope to provide an overview of my inquiry process.