Relevance of Essay Tests to Grade/Subject Level

EDU 6160 bPortfolio Post 4                            Ian Lewis                                 October 30, 2016

Discuss the relevance of essay tests to your grade level or subject.

Essay tests are incredibly relevant to the grade level and subject areas of my internship experience. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test that each seventh grade student completes near the end of the year includes an essay portion where students read selected passages and respond in essay format to a relevant prompt. In order to prepare students for this test, while also developing skills required of seventh grade common core state standards (CCSS), students work throughout the year to master scaffolded steps that lead to the completion of entire informative, comparative, or persuasive essays.

In English Language Arts (ELA), the necessary skills are constantly drilled and practiced with regard to essay tests, but social studies as well experiences practice that inevitably assists with the completion of essay tests. At the start of the year, a pre assessment essay prompt resembling that incorporated in the SBAC was given to students to assess their entrance essay skills in ELA. These were graded using a 32 point rubric that then corresponds to a scaled system of writing bands (0, 0.5, 1, 1.5…4), where students are taught ways and encouraged in how to increase the band level of their essay writing through attentiveness to each portion of the rubric (thesis, intro. paragraph, concluding paragraph, craft/voice, etc.). Further essays will use the same rubric so that students may continually track and reflect on necessary skills and areas for progress. However, at this point, we have not actually written any essays or had any further essay tests. This is because we are still building foundational, scaffolded skills necessary for an essay, such as the ability to write effective summaries, and the ability to craft a single, efficient informational paragraph that incorporates the use of text evidence to support ideas.

The ability to adequately summarize presents itself in an essay via its introduction. In crafting a thesis statement relevant to two text excerpts, for example, a student will be required to create an introductory paragraph that introduces the texts (titles and authors), briefly summarizes their main points, and states how such main points relate to a thesis topic, all of which are steps practiced in writing a summary based on our format of Somebody (character), Wants (goal), But (conflict), So (rising action, and climax), and What (falling action, and resolution). In addition to useful summary skills, single paragraph expertise is required before an essay can be mastered.

To create a format that is easily transmitted to essay application, students are taught a specific paragraph structure for writing information paragraphs, which were practiced twice this quarter. The Step-Up paragraph model uses a combination of three chunks of three sentences (main idea, incorporated example from text, and explanation of text evidence as it relates to topic sentence), and the emphasis of transitions between main ideas, to enable students to create simply structured informational paragraphs that may later be expanded into essay format; the three main ideas turn into three body paragraphs, each of which provides three text examples and three associated explanations. As second quarter begins next month, we will continue to practice this single paragraph model, but we will now apply it to the creation of comparative and persuasive paragraphs. Eventually, we will be ready to practice essays by expanding this single paragraph structure. As stated before though, it is necessary to teach the foundational skills necessary before jumping straight into entire essays.

In addition to specific paragraph writing practice, students experience short answer questions on all of their ELA reading selection quizzes. While these are just short answer questions that is not to say they are not useful in establishing essay test skills. As previously discussed, our paragraph model places an emphasis of incorporating text evidence and explaining this evidence in relation to a main idea (skills necessary for crafting successful essays), and the short answer questions always lend themselves to being turned into a single paragraph response following this model. While not the primary focus, social studies also allows for essay skill practice. The social studies unit tests include short answer questions as well that allow students to practice foundational skills to be used later when writing expanded essays. Eventually, the single paragraph practice will turn into the essays and students will begin to be able to track their growth and progress as essayists using the previously described rubric and band system.