The Documentation and Evaluation of Student Mastery

The documentation of student mastery should be authentic, thorough, thoughtful, based on students zone of proximal development, covering the material required by the curriculum. If it's a spelling evaluation, students will need to get nine out of ten words or eighteen out of twenty words to show mastery. If they are reading a book, they should miss no more than one word a page. If they are writing, it depends on the grade level.

For the younger grades, they should spell all their vocabulary words and sight words that they know correctly, allowing for one to two mistakes. The piece should be as coherent as possible, make sense, and stay on topic. For the older grades, the grading will be harder. They should have complete thoughts and sentences, punctuation and grammar mistakes should only be kept to one to four depending on the length of the piece and there should only be one or two spelling mistakes. They need to be done in a timely manner and parents and guardians need to be given the information as soon as possible so they can see how their child is doing.

Evaluation strategies can include grading class journals, requiring writing prompts, short essays questions, reflections, summaries on books they've read, book reports, and looking at class assignments. It's also good to evaluate students based on personal growth and progress, once the school year is in full spring a teacher can look at a new writing sample and one from the month before and compare them with each other. A good way to keep track of student work is to have them make portfolios of their best writing work which they'll be required to turn in every few weeks or so.