Unit Week: Writing Pre-Assessment

The students used Google Forms to take the pre-assessment on November 09, 2020. This
was the students’ first time using Google Forms, so it took a long time to help the students access
the assessment and figure out how to complete it. 35 students total took the pre-assessment on
Google Forms. They were asked two questions about informative writing.
The class was placed in two breakout rooms on Zoom, with each group being led by one
of the YSU students in the classroom. They were first given a walkthrough of how to access the
pre-assessment on their iPads within the Google Classroom. Then they had to leave the Zoom
while they were verbally walked through the steps to access it once again. Many students and
their family members struggled to get to the Google Classroom, so additional explanations were
provided to them. As the struggling students and family members were receiving additional
instruction on how to access the assessment, some of the students took the pre-assessment with
the assistance of an adult at home. These students were allowed to leave Zoom for the day to
work on espark. Once all of the students were in the Google Form, each question was read aloud
to them and an explanation of how to select an answer was given to them for each problem.
Since using Google Forms is new to the students, this may affect the data in some ways.
However, it can still be used to make instructional decisions when planning lessons for unit
week.
Since this is the first formal writing the students will be completing this school year, the
goal was to find how in-depth the purpose of this type of writing should be covered and whether
or not the students are familiar with topic and closing sentences. These questions will help to
decide where the lesson should start and how in-depth academic language from the standard
should be covered. The pre-assessment questions were presented as multiple choice questions:
The following graphs represent the responses to each question by the class:
 For question 1, only 23 of the 35 students who took the assessment responded. However,
78.3% of the students who did respond were able to identify the correct answer, stating that
informative texts are used to share facts about a topic. Target student 1 selected the incorrect
answer that said that informative texts share feelings about a topic, but target student 2 was able
to successfully choose the correct answer. It is possible that many students did not respond to
this question because they did not know the answer. It would be beneficial to review the purpose
of this type of writing with the students at the beginning of the first lesson, based on this data.
However, this explanation will not be too in-depth since many students already understand the
purpose of this type of writing.

For question 2, 34 of the 35 students who took the assessment responded to this question.
85.3% of the students who responded were able to select the correct answer, showing that they
understand that there are both topic and closing sentences in writing. Since the majority of the
students were able to correctly answer this question, including the two target students, less
attention will be focused during the actual lesson on the structure of informative writing while
more time will be spent modeling how to write effective topic and closing sentences. Each
definition and the academic language will still be discussed since the students have not formally
written any works this school year, but less time will be allotted for this part of the instruction.