What data will we collect?
Teachers will answer key questions about their writing instruction to generate more than 75 data points. By asking a series of questions on our survey, which is designed to be adaptive, we will be able to gather an enormous amount of data without taking more than 3 minutes of a teacher's time.
Examples of the questions we ask, and associated answer choices, are below:
- Grammar activities
- Individual sentences
- Short response(s) or paragraph(s) that are not part of a longer product
- Essay, report, or paper
- Letter
- Narrative and/or creative writing
- Students did not do any writing during this lesson
- 5 minutes
- 10 minutes
- 15 minutes
- 20 minutes
- 25 minutes
- 30 minutes
- 35 minutes
- 40 minutes
- 45 minutes
- 50 minutes
- 55 minutes
- 60 minutes
- Yes
- No
- The individual student
- Teacher
- Peers
- School faculty (e.g., administrator, custodian, guidance counselor, other teachers)
- Family members (e.g., parents, guardians, siblings, grandparents)
- Standardized test grader
- External audience (e.g., politician, newspaper, college admissions officer, employer)
- Teacher thinking aloud
- Teacher modeling
- Reviewing a rubric or checklist
- Analyzing a teacher-written model piece of writing
- Analyzing a published piece of writing (mentor text)
- Analyzing an exemplary piece of student writing
- Analyzing a piece of writing to identify areas of improvement
- Discussion (whole class or small group)
- Students working on a collaborative piece of writing
- Independent writing
- Setting or reflecting on progress toward goals
- None of the above
- Individualized oral feedback from a teacher
- Individualized written feedback from a teacher
- Whole-class feedback from a teacher
- Peer feedback
- Individualized feedback from an online program
- No, not on this piece of writing
- Conferenced with students to assess understanding
- Looked at student work to assess understanding
- Calculated percent correct
- Used a checklist
- Used a rubric based on an external assessment (e.g., state or national exams)
- Used a rubric that is part of a curriculum
- Used a school or district-created rubric
- Used a teacher-created rubric
- Did not assess today
How will we reflect teachers' data back to them?
Treatment teachers will have a personalized data dashboard that aggregates and summarizes their daily writing instructional practices from across the year. This private dashboard will allow teachers to reflect on their own instructional practices.
In the example dashboard above, the teacher can see which skills they have spent the most time on, as well as how the amount of time devoted to writing instruction has varied over time.
