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Writing Assessment

High School Grades 9-12

High School Graduation Qualifying Examinations

At the high school level there is an increased need to focus on the skills students need to successfully pass the High School Graduation Qualifying Examinations. The Department of Education's web site provides important and helpful information for teachers. We especially recommend:

Practice Tests (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or better)

Teacher Resources

Go there now: http://www.eed.state.ak.us/tls/assessment/hsgqe.html

Six Traits of Effective Readers

The following six traits of effective readers helps teachers pinpoint what they should be seeing in middle school and high school readers. The six traits of an effective reader (the discrete skill areas that identify what good readers do)—are:

  1. Decoding conventions of writing, organization, and genre. Advanced students are able to recognize correct grammatical constructions, understand the function of punctuation, and have an awareness of spelling conventions. They can identify the title, author, and components of the text, such as the table of contents and chapter headings. And they can identify the genre.
  2. Establishing comprehension. Students can state or write a thesis statement; name major and minor examples of the thesis; identify the turning moments with facts and examples; and connect the turning points to the main thesis.
  3. Realizing context. Students can use examples from the text to discuss the author’s intentions and inferred meanings, both implicit and explicit.
  4. Developing interpretation. Students can identify problems in texts and resolve them using clues and evidence.
  5. Integrating for synthesis. Students can connect text with other texts, subjects, and experiences.
  6. Critiquing for evaluation. Students can, with insight and evidence, critique ideas and perspectives found in the reading.

Source: Toolkit98 is designed to assist classroom teachers to become better assessors of student learning. http://www.nwrel.org/nwreport/oct98/article1.html