Teachers Score District Writing Assessments

Learning how to write properly continues to be important, even more so in this age of texting and twitter. Pre-Kindergarten through 11th grade students in Topeka Public Schools recently were involved in a writing performance assessment. Teachers in the district then scored, or evaluated, the student’s performance on the writing assessments. More than 13,000 papers were scored.

The papers were scored on six traits: ideas/content, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conversations. “We were really pleased how our teachers across all curricular areas have increased their focus on writing,” said Dr. Steve Burkholder, Executive Director of Instruction. Certain grades have had written assessments for a number of years. This is the second year for all grade levels of student performance assessment writing in Topeka Public Schools.