This school year, the data we had on student writing was very limited due to the pandemic cutting last year short. However, I had seen a pattern with students’ writing and it was always an area where they struggled. Even in the beginning, with the little writing students had done on Nearpod, an app provided to us by our school that broadcasts content and interactive learning activities, I noticed that students struggled to organize their thoughts and provide evidence that supported their thinking. Students wrote incomplete paragraphs with sentences that lacked flow, where their ideas did not connect. Students were not eager to write, rushing through assignments  often, just to get them done and sacrificing quality. Students focused on answering the question, but did not think about how best to articulate their answer. Students disengaged when it came to writing because they struggled to come up with what to write, usually leading to frustration or hopelessness. Students shied away from long responses, usually writing the bare minimum on assessments to get a decent grade. Students’ short and to-the-point responses showed me that they were not confident in their ability to compose complex responses and were not sure how to tie evidence with their own thoughts and ideas.

I took time to teach writing strategies for composing detailed responses, like the R.A.C.E. (shown in Figure 1) but students still had trouble producing quality responses. During whole group discussion, I noticed that students did not understand writing modes and why their writing needed to be organized. I also observed that students only recognized two different types of texts: fiction and nonfiction. Students had expressed to me that as long as they answered the question, the organization of their ideas was unimportant. I planned to assess student paragraph-writing during second quarter and see if organization continued to be the area where students needed the most improvement. After assessing their argumentative essays at the end of Quarter 2, it was evident that students still needed practice with organizing their writing. Although students were assessed in argumentative writing during Quarter 2 and were assessed in narrative writing during the study period, the focus on organization in writing allowed for a valid comparison. Students’ overall scores on their essays were used for grading purposes and served as a way to gauge their writing ability in order to put them in leveled groups.